Download 2012 Frankfurt 8

Beyond Ideology and Utopia: Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Cultivation
David Kettler (Bard College, USA)
Abstract: The paper first characterizes Mannheim as he appeared at the time of his call
to Frankfurt, with a view to explaining how this highly controversial figure came to be
selected as Ordinarius; second, it points towards Mannheim’s versatile adaptation to the
new situation and his extraordinary success as mentor to a talented cohort of young
scholars, notwithstanding the brutal disruption of this undertaking in 1933. The surprise
is that the fateful hostility of the nationalist and anti-Semitic Right against its enemies,
the political conflict to which this conference is mainly dedicated, played little part in the
story of Mannheim in Frankfurt. The politics at issue in this “politicalization” of the
university was constitutional and republican, and the established opposition was a
composite of the older Mandarinism and the incipient disciplinary professionalism that
prevailed even in Frankfurt, yielding a passivity towards the old university culture that
had its own political consequences.
Karl Mannheim had only three years in Frankfurt, yet he was such a signal force
in German intellectual life in the late Republic that the story of the university in those
years cannot be rightly told without attending to his contested appointment and to his
achievements as educator as well as contributor to his discipline. And the focus of the
present conference on the interplay between the nationalist Right and its enemies among
faculty, students and public of Goethe University during the later Weimar years requires
us also to take note of his earlier treatment by cultural conservatives as epitome of the
supposedly sophistical and distinctly Jewish disruptive force in the realm of German
Bildung, an evaluation that eventually played into the more venomous Fascist versions of
these polemical motifs. Yet the political dimension of the Mannheim story is by no
means exhausted by this theme. Mannheim’s appointment was a function of quite a
different political design, and his three years as Preussischer Beamter, as he referred to
himself with pride a few days before his exile, were loyally—and brilliantly—devoted to
essaying a political education supportive of the Weimar project, while concurrently
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legitimating the practice of sociology as emergent discipline. This will be my main story,
and one of my aims will be to counter the simplification that sweepingly charges the
victims of Nazi rule with self-delusion or hapless failure. There were good people doing
conscientiously what they could do, but they were defeated. Karl Mannheim was one
such actor.
I am honored, of course, to be asked to speak on Mannheim on the present
occasion, but I am also struck by a coincidental regularity in my dealings with Mannheim
at this university. Fifty years ago, during the academic year 1961 to 1962 it was here in
Frankfurt that I began my first serious scholarly encounter with Mannheim, as Senior
Fulbright Scholar at the Institut für Sozialforschung, thanks to an introduction to Max
Horkheimer through Kurt H. Wolff, one of Mannheim’s most devoted students and my
colleague at the Ohio State University. I will not claim that either Professor Horkheimer
or his coadjutor, Theodor Adorno, was delighted with my eventual choice of subject; and
my connection with the Institute was consequently more nominal than profound. Yet this
is where I worked. To be precise about the 50th anniversary of the present day, however,
I was in Vienna during the last days of June fifty years ago, waiting for the visa to enter
Hungary, where I planned to interview Georg Lukács, an early mentor of Mannheim,
who enabled me to uncover Mannheim’s precocious contributions to the famous
Budapest Sunday Circle of the First World War. This research was an important step in
an effort by my generation of scholars to rescue Mannheim from the equally obtuse and
patronizing but antithetical stereotypes rampant at the time in Frankfurt and among
American sociologists.
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In 1989, then, I found myself once again in Frankfurt, unexpectedly playing a
small but unusual part in the celebration by the Social Science Faculty to mark the 75th
anniversary of the University—a twenty-five year interval between the two
commemorations if not quite literally on the calendar. Mannheim was involved once
again, but now posthumously in his capacity as exceptional teacher rather than
researcher. Through a series of happy accidents, I had become acquainted with Nina
Rubinstein, who had completed her dissertation under Mannheim at the very beginning of
1933 but who could not secure her promotion because of the brown-shirted assaults
against the Sociological Institute, as well as the urgent necessity forcing her Menshevik
family into exile in the very early days of the regime. After discussing and studying the
dissertation with the anthropologist, Hanna Papanek, and consulting with my long-time
friend and collaborator, Volker Meja—another Frankfurter and former student at the
Institute—I initiated an effort to have the work duly recognized by the university—a
project to which Rubinstein agreed only on condition that this would not be construed as
a Wiedergutmachung but as a merited promotion—, and this undertaking succeeded,
thanks above all to Claudia Honegger, who was then teaching at the University and who
had, together with Ulf Matthiessen, conducted a seminar on Mannheim in 1988.
Matthiessen’s article on Mannheim in Frankfurt in the publication issued in 1989 sets a
supremely high standard even when read a generation later, as does Honegger’s closely
connected pioneering study of women sociologists in Frankfurt, a remarkable group
among Mannheim’s students. My collaborators and I drew gratefully on both studies in
the two books on Mannheim’s Frankfurt years that we published during the past ten
years.
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Since the University insisted on a viva voce examination of the 82-year-old
candidate, the head of the department, Heinz Steinert, ingeniously arranged the event to
coincide with the 75th anniversary celebratory symposium, using it to reinforce his
undertaking to free Frankfurt social science from the legend that it had all been about
nothing but the “Frankfurt School” of Horkheimer and Adorno. After a very brief
disputation between Rubinstein and a committee chaired by Iring Fetscher and consisting
as well of Heinz Steinert, Juergen Habermas, and myself, and a thoroughly merited award
of the degree magna cum laude, there were not one but two laudations in the Great Aula
of the historic building—with one of them offered in Rubinstein’s beloved Russian
language. And now I am here, three days removed from my own 82nd birthday, recalling
the event.
The newspapers at the time treated the promotion of Nina Rubinstein as a humaninterest story, emphasizing her manifest delight in the unexpected outcome and
highlighting her great charm. For those of us most directly involved, however, and for
Rubinstein herself in our less public discussions and letters, the matter had a serious side,
which may serve as a transition to our present frame of reference. What happened in the
post-war years with regard to the individuals harmed by the University’s implementation
of Nazi designs? Or rather, what failed to happen—leaving aside a quota of
Wiedergutmachung appointments? And why did it take an accidental intervention by an
outsider and the mobilization of some junior faculty to bring about a “happy end” in this
case? What had been the status of this past in the reconstructed present of the fictitious
Stunde Null? These are not new questions, of course, but they also belong in the
background of our present commemoration.
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The politics of memory are complex, as these personal anecdotes suggest, and it is
necessary to take distance in order to give a coherent account that can be shared and
reflected upon. In the time remaining, then, I will first characterize Mannheim as he
appeared at the time of his call to Frankfurt, with a view to explaining how this highly
controversial figure came to be selected as Ordinarius; second, I will point towards
Mannheim’s versatile adaptation to the new situation and his extraordinary success as
mentor to a talented cohort of young scholars, notwithstanding the brutal disruption of
this undertaking in 1933. At the end, I will ask what may have been learned about the
need for Heinz Steinert and Ulf Matthiessen to recover Mannheim in 1989 as a prime
contributor to at least one of the two social sciences in Frankfurt. The surprise, in any
case, will be that the fateful hostility of the nationalist and anti-Semitic Right against its
enemies, the political conflict to which this conference is mainly dedicated, played little
part in the story of Mannheim in Frankfurt.
This is not to say that Mannheim never encountered opposition as an alien, a Jew,
and a malign threat to German culture and cultivation after he left Hungary for Germany
in 1919. Yet the most vehement of such challenges came in official guise from
bureaucrats who knew or cared nothing about him except for his demographic attributes
and his ambitions for a university career. In contesting a waiver of the twenty year
requirement before the naturalization thought necessary for a regular appointment as
Privatdozent by some of the resistant senior Heidelberg faculty, the interior ministries in
Württemberg and Bavaria who had a voice under law, charged—in the language of the
Bavarians—that “the ever more common intrusion of Eastern foreigners of foreign stock
[fremdstämmige Ausländer] into German university careers must gradually lead to a
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flooding of German culture by foreign elements [Überfremdung deutscher Kultur].”
This objection eventually failed of its practical effect, however, because the ministry in
Baden pressed the case for Mannheim as exception because of his supposed upbringing
in the German language and his categorical lack of interest in politics. While the
symbolism deployed in some criticisms of Mannheim’s path-breaking and provocative
Ideologie und Utopie overlapped with figures also found in racist and ultra-political
denunciations of the time and of the Nazi era, they are best understood as interpretative
models of the “conservative” and Mandarin type that was by no means reserved to protoFascist or harshly anti-Semitic currents. As Reinhard Laube has shown, Mannheim was
cast as a prime example of the latter day rootless intellectual as Sophist by such writers as
Eduard Spranger and Karl Jaspers, although the generational difference in the force of
such denunciations is manifest in the free adaptation of Aristophanes’ “Clouds”
composed by Mannheim’s Heidelberg students—led by Norbert Elias and Richard
Loewenthal—on the occasion of his call to Frankfurt, where this same figure is deployed
as affectionate satire. Sociology as represented by Mannheim was in important measure
a generational matter.
The actual conflict in 1929 about Mannheim’s candidacy to succeed Franz
Oppenheimer in the Chair of Sociology was only obliquely related to such ideologically
charged distrust of the new field as an attack on traditional Bildung. The politics at issue
in this “politicalization” of the university was constitutional and republican, and the
established opposition was a composite of the older Mandarinism and the incipient
disciplinary professionalism that prevailed even in Frankfurt. Stated differently,
however, Mannheim was opposed above all as the representative figure of a generation
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that was not shaped by the Empire and the Great War, as well as of an influx of
intellectuals into university careers. It is not coincidental that generations and
intellectuals are two of the central subjects in Mannheim’s reflexive sociology.
Sociology figured large in the policies of the most influential university reformer
of the Weimar era, the Prussian Minister of Culture, Carl H. Becker, who was himself an
innovative scholar of Islam. Sociology, he thought, could provide the common civil
understanding that would enable individuals to recognize themselves through their
dealings with others as peers and partners, without the discredited elitism and
romanticism of the older academic conception. A sociological culture, moreover, would
foster respect for diversity, as it encouraged individuals to take distance from themselves
without fear of losing themselves. The individual subject of cultivation would reappear
as a social being capable of being molded into a citizen; the universalistic assets of
culture would be recognized as elements of social cooperation; and the activism integral
to cultivation would reveal itself as civic virtue. To this end Becker was instrumental in
establishing a greater role for sociology in the thirteen years of the Weimar Republic.
Fifteen chairs of sociology were established at eleven universities. In addition, fifty-five
full or part-time teachers of sociology were hired. But this institutionalization was not as
complete as it might seem due to resistance from the academic establishment. Most of the
chairs were either attached to other disciplines, such as political economy, or located in
institutes that were not integral parts of the universities. Sociology had its strongest
impact in new universities such as Köln, where Leopold von Wiese established his
institute, and Frankfurt, which had the first university chairs of sociology in its own right.
Mannheim gained that chair when it came open after the retirement of Franz
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Oppenheimer in 1929, but the steps leading to this outcome deserve somewhat closer
analysis since they are perhaps uniquely instructive about the inwardly contested
university complex that was sundered with the Nazi seizure of power.
Minister Becker’s first offer went to Emil Lederer, a professor at Heidelberg,
after a six-month consultative process following rules laid down by his ministry,
including consultation with non-professors teaching in the field, in the course of which
some fifteen academics were given favorable mention by various participants, but
Lederer was not in fact mentioned by anyone at any point in the proceedings. He was
simply Becker’s choice. Emil Lederer was a Social Democrat with extensive experience
as editor of the most important journal in the social sciences, service on public bodies
dealing with questions of socialization, and a record of studies that built towards a
sociology inspired by Marx but carefully attentive to current empirical developments and
non-polemical to a fault. He was also the mentor of Karl Mannheim in his transition
from philosopher to sociologist. The Minister’s notice of Lederer’s designation to the
Frankfurt faculty mentioned it as an accomplished fact in two messages, the second of
which initiated a consultation on bringing Karl Mannheim as salaried instructor in
conjunction with Lederer.
In contrast to Lederer’s name, Mannheim’s had in fact come up once in the course
of the discussions, surprisingly enough as a conditional after-thought in the initial letter
by Franz Oppenheimer, although he also dismissed the “Heidelberg School” out of hand,
as a cultural sociology without firm footing anywhere. Oppenheimer thought—
presciently, as it proved—that Mannheim would be clever enough to shift at least a little
in the direction of Oppenheimer’s own more empirical “Frankfurter School” if he were
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given the responsibilities of the office, but Oppenheimer’s actual choice, of course, was
his closest follower among the non-professorial teachers, Gottfried Salomon, and the
reference to Mannheim came at the very end. In the event, the actual list of preferences
agreed by the professors as well as the non-professorial contingent, made it appear that
the faculty were no less hostile to Oppenheimer than they would prove to be to
Mannheim later. The list was Oppenheimer’s nightmare, consisting of Hans Kelsen, Carl
Schmitt, and Leopold von Wiese, all of them harshly opposed to his theoretical and
methodological designs, and none of them, indeed, sociologists in any sense he
recognized.
Before Lederer declined the offer, the faculty wrote to the minister against the
appointment of Mannheim as his associate, cautiously limiting itself to budgetary
considerations in its rationale, but indicating as well that the presence of Paul Tillich—
imposed earlier by Becker—adequately covered the “philosophical” side of social
studies. Nevertheless, the communication from the ministry confirming Lederer’s
declination also blithely asked the faculty to express itself on Karl Mannheim as
successor to Oppenheimer. This set in motion a series of requests for personal meetings
between the Dean of the Faculty or his delegates and the high officials of the ministry.
The emphasis throughout was that Mannheim represented a “philosophical” approach
that was not needed and would not be understood by the students, and that the
appointment must go to someone with juristic or economic grounding, with Kelsen as the
overwhelming favorite. For this approach, the Dean also sought the active support of the
Oberbürgermeister, who was well connected with the Prussian government.
Interestingly, the Faculty was able to gain the support as well of the Kurator, Riezler,
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who normally facilitated Becker’s plans; yet the ministry did not budge. It is important to
note in the present context that Kelsen was well known as an active supporter of
constitutional democracy, and that he was at the time the victim of thinly disguised antiSemitic attacks in Vienna. This speaks against the presumption that the faculty
indifference to Lederer and resistance to Mannheim were a function of anti-Semitism.
The point is that Kelsen was manifestly not a sociologist in Becker’s sense. Within
months, Kelsen did in fact receive a call to a professorship from the Prussian ministry,
but to a position in international law at the University of Cologne, an opening designed
with considerable ingenuity to find a way of accommodating a great specialist in Austrian
public law, who was being brutalized at his home university and who evidently also had
strong local support from Konrad Adenauer, the Oberbürgermeister of Cologne. There
was in short no personal hostility to Kelsen in the ministry, whose policy was consistent
even after the departure of Becker early in 1930, but the political priorities dictated a
different choice for Frankfurt.
After a meeting at the ministry in late November, then, the Frankfurt Dean of the
Social Science Faculty writes to the ministry to reiterate the standpoint that he had orally
presented there, underlining the contention that Mannheim is too abstruse and obscure for
the Frankfurt students with a rather desperate anecdote about a colleague from southern
Germany who’d just written to say that he’d heard Mannheim give a lecture that was
“simply impossible to understand.” On December 11, the report of Mannheim’s
designation as Oppenheimer’s successor is in the newspapers. The incomplete archival
record contains no trace of an explanation to the faculty, as is also the case in the more
complete portion devoted to the earlier offer to Lederer. A strong political action, we
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may conclude, to impose Karl Mannheim against a determined opposition that offered a
plausible counter in Kelsen. What made Mannheim so attractive to Becker and so
unwanted in the faculty of social sciences?
We may distinguish two stages in the process by which Mannheim came to
represent a sociology at home in the university and yet exceptionally consistent with
Becker’s hopes for the political effects of the discipline: the first centers on Ideologie
und Utopie (1929) and his last years in Heidelberg, and the other is made manifest during
his brief career in Frankfurt. The report on Mannheim’s appointment in the Frankfurter
Zeitung, almost certainly written by Siegfried Kracauer, captures the expectations,
through the eyes of a friendly but not uncritical observer:
The appointment of the Heidelberg Privatdozent, Karl Mannheim to the
recently vacated chair of Franz Oppenheimer gains the Frankfurt University one
of the best representatives of modern sociology. Mannheim has moved forward
along the lines of Max Weber and was associated with Scheler. In his recently
published work, Ideologie und Utopie (Friedrich Cohen, Bonn), which has been
much discussed, he has developed the basic elements of his thinking. It is, at
least in his intentions, directed towards the political. While it is true that
Mannheim aspires above all to a sociology of knowledge with the task of
pursuing value-free research into ideologies, he nevertheless puts this discipline
completely at the service of a political sociology, which would have to prepare
the way, in his view, to a political decision. Its primary obligation would be to
exhibit the partiality of politically bound particular knowledge, and, from case to
case, to achieve a composite view of the diverse political structures of thinking:
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to provide a concrete orientation, which would have to emerge from a will to
action.
The crux of the matter is not that Mannheim would inculcate one or another
political opinion, but that he would equip his students with a style of political thinking
congruent with a constitution dependent on partisan mutual adjustments but undermined
by ideological mutual incomprehension and categorical antipathy. From the standpoint
of the leading figures in the faculty, many of them quite conventional economists, such
emphasis on political discourse and orientation sounded more like the work of an
“intellectual” than the work of a scholar dedicated to rigorous and increasingly
professionalized academic science.
In the light of Mannheim’s well-known emphasis on “intellectuals” as uniquely
qualified for reflective social and political knowledge, it is important, first, to establish
that Mannheim cared about the university as a focal point for organizing, transmitting,
and advancing such knowledge. After all, “intellectual” refers above all to the loose-knit
social formation comprising journalists, literary figures, students, artists, and the like,
with academics taking part, like the others, only in their “amateur” capacities. Yet it is
clear that Mannheim thought that intellectuals require university discipline in order to
move beyond the realm of public opinion and to give effective voice and educational
efficacy to the knowledge that their location opens to them.
Mannheim had spoken to the subject even before he committed himself to
sociology in 1922, in a newspaper article decrying the failure of university faculties to
enter into effective exchanges with the young people who arrived with new kinds of
valuable artistic, religious, communitarian, and literary experiences and intuitions, where
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he nevertheless left no doubt that these impulses must be appropriated and constrained by
scientific disciplines and not treated as spontaneous prophecies and authoritative
revelations, whatever the students and their extra-mural mentors wished to believe. A
similar recognition of university discipline appeared in Mannheim’s treatment of Ernst
Troeltsch, whom he otherwise recognized, alongside Max Scheler, to be Max Weber’s
peer as a classic forebear of the sociology he envisions. He writes about a “spiritual
divide” within German thought,
Between a brilliant, often very profound world of independent scholarship
and aestheticism, which often loses itself in untestable vagaries, however, because it
lacks inner or outer constraining bonds, on the one side, and, on the other, a
scholarly world constrained by its academic positions and mastering its materials,
but distant from the living centre of contemporary life.
At the time of his arrival in Heidelberg in 1921, finally, he expressly associates a slightly
more localized version of this distinction with Max Weber:
Heidelberg’s spiritual life may be calibrated by two polar opposites. One
pole consists of the sociologists and the other, the Georgians. The ideal-typical
representative of the one is the already deceased Max Weber, and that of the other
is the poet, Stefan George. On the one side, the university, and on the other, the
unbounded extramural world of the literati.
There is no doubt where Mannheim took his stand.
In Ideologie und Utopie, the brilliant work on which his subsequent reputation has
mostly rested, the principal essay on “Politics as Science” is most germane to the
questions about intellectuals, scientific studies, and political education. The sociology of
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knowledge strategy developed there involves two steps. First, the variety of ideas in the
modern world is classified according to a scheme of historical ideological types, few in
number, in keeping with Mannheim's thesis that the ideological field has moved from a
period of atomistic diversity and competition to a period of concentration. Liberalism,
conservatism, and socialism are the principal types. Second, each of these ideologies is
interpreted as a function of some specific way of being in the social world, as defined by
location within the historically changing patterns of class and generational stratification.
Each of the ideologies is said to manifest a characteristic “style” of thinking, a
distinctive complex of responses to the basic issues that systematic philosophy has
identified as constitutive of human consciousness, such as conceptions of time and space,
the structure of reality, human agency, and knowledge itself. The political judgments and
recommendations on the surface of purely ideological texts must be taken in that larger
structural context. Each of the styles, in turn, expresses some distinctive design upon the
world vitally bound up with the situation of one of the social strata present in the
historical setting. He derived the ideology concept proximately from Marxism, but
neither the proletariat nor any other socio-political force is bearer of a transcendent
rationality, historically destined to reintegrate all the struggling irrationalities in a higher,
pacified order. Sociology of knowledge seeks to give an account of the whole
ideological field, in its historical interaction and change, together with an account of the
historically changing class and generational situations that the ideologies interpret to the
groups involved. To have a method for seeing all this, according to Mannheim, means to
be able to see in a unified and integrated way what each of the ideologically oriented
viewers can only see in part. It is to have the capacity for viewing the situation at a
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distance and as a whole, without it losing the quality of being a situation in which actions
matter. The contesting social forces and their projects in the world are complementary
and in need of a synthesis that will incorporate elements of their diverse social wills and
visions. Syntheses in political vision and Sozialwissenschaften are interdependent.
Sociology of knowledge presages and fosters both. In the end, nevertheless, choice gains
in importance as a central feature of the experimental life, which is the epitome of the
sociological attitude.
The crisis of Weimar political thinking was intensified, according to Mannheim,
by the fact that the parties in conflict, each constituted and integrated by a distinct
ideology, are also all informed by a vulgar version of the insight into ideology as thought
grounded in social group interests. As a result they mutually seek to discredit one
another by an exposé of the ideological character of all their ideas, a maneuver that
purports to show that their respective claims about political and social life are nothing but
weapons in a struggle among competing interests. Under these conditions, there cannot
be any movement towards the synthetic view that Mannheim had elsewhere credited to
the operations of competition among ideologies during the nineteenth century. Political
agents—and under conditions of democratization this encompasses everyone—were now
trapped within an array of collective solipsisms, each in their all encompassing partisan
posture.
Revolution cannot be counted on to provide a definitive breakthrough, as Lukács
argued, but neither can a decisive political leader, however charismatic, as Max Weber
had suggested. Mannheim proposed instead that a mode of political knowledge grounded
in the peculiar interstitial situation of the intellectuals—whose individual cultivation and
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experiences detached them from their native milieus and perspectives—could generate
and transmit a common orientation to the historical realities and possibilities sufficient to
permit the parties to escape from their mutual isolation and to engage in politics with one
another. The work on this synthetic interpretation of historical configurations and trends,
according to Mannheim, is “political sociology.” Mannheim was clear that the political
role of the political sociologist is as researcher and teacher. Where political sociology
constituted itself as a field of study, the work of comprehending the changing reality
would still eventuate, as Weber himself claimed, in acts of choice.
Mannheim expressly invited the comparison with Weber. After registering, in
agreement with Weber, that the synthetic, trans-ideological political knowledge he thinks
attainable does not presume to yield the political decisions that individuals must make in
their capacities as political persons, he distinguishes his position from Weber. He notes
that both aim at a “common platform for investigation of the political field,” but he
claims that Weber conceives of this platform in terms of the liberal ideal of an
intellectual domain, where pure rationality might reign free, remaining categorically
distinct from the dynamics of practice, while Mannheim himself, in contrast, envisions a
platform that is achievable only from moment to moment, as elements derived from the
ideological conflict are provisionally balanced against one another and made into the
organon of studies that moderates and orients the ongoing political competition. No
ideology is fully valid, if only because it expresses a merely partial and perspectival view
of the social world. But no ideology is worthless in Mannheim’s version of perspectivism
because of the genuine insights that each perspective yields. Because the sociologist must
work with and upon political-ideological matter, and because the work of the sociologist
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is inherently an intervention in political life, there can be no bright line between the
political and scientific vocations. In this sense, Mannheim concluded, there can indeed be
a politics as science.
Ideology and Utopia stands in a complex relationship to Mannheim’s effort to
create a recognized “platform” for sociology. While the success of the book beyond the
university, documented by a unique and extended dispute in a wide range of media,
helped to boost the standing of the field with the relevant public, its controversial claims
and essayistic manner did not lend Mannheim any special authority or power within the
influential senior ranks of the profession. He remained an outsider until his appointment
at Frankfurt.
There is not time to report at length on Mannheim’s achievements in the
university, so I will simply list a number of points that show how well Mannheim
vindicated Becker’s judgment.
1.
Mannheim’s lecture courses, beginning with his remarkable introductory
lectures of 1930, pursued an ingenious program of political cultivation,
with special focus on exercises in reflexivity, to bring students to
identify their own places in the complex public space of their time, and
to take sufficient distance for critical judgment. His non-polemical
lectures on fascism and orthodox Marxism were especially striking in
this respect.
2.
Mannheim was notably attentive to questions about the status of women
and guided a surprisingly large number of women students in doctoral
dissertations of continuing value.
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3.
Mannheim’s initiatives in work with advanced students and junior faculty
in the well known workshop on “early liberalism” yielded a number of
important studies and provided a setting for the maturation of Norbert
Elias, Hans Gerth, and others who made great contributions in exile.
4.
And with it all, Mannheim devoted great energy to legitimating the
sociology chair within the emerging profession, redefining himself as
someone in the tradition of Max Weber—as Oppenheimer had
predicted—and relegating his more ambitious philosophical interests to
a place on the margins of the discipline for which he sought to provide a
new more inclusive constitution.
My principal objective in this talk is to counter the teleological reading of
the Weimar Republic according to which everything is understood as a precursor
to victimhood. Many of the exiles themselves, in their bitterness, did themselves
the injustice of denouncing their own conduct, which was often in fact honorable
and courageous, given the limits of their political resources. But even after the
end of exile, and especially among some of those who returned to Frankfurt, the
basic formula underlying the deal made between those who had remained and
those who had come back was that “Bonn is not Weimar,” and this slogan in turn
made it convenient for many years to disregard those who had sought to make
Weimar work. If there were time, I would tell about another “Frankfurt School”
that has been especially subjected to such mutilation. I am thinking of the group
of labor lawyers and other scholars assembled around Hugo Sinzheimer and the
Akademie der Arbeit. That too was the product of the policy of constitutional and
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democratic politicization pursued by Becker above all. My judgment of Becker’s
undertaking obviously differs from the view set forth in some recent literature,
according to which the “politicization” undertaken by the Prussian Minister of
Culture damaged the autonomy and self-respect of the university community and
in fact prepared the way for the “politicization” inflicted by the Nazis and their
supporters. Quite apart from the fact that there is no evidence that the universities
outside Prussia were more resistant to the new order, such an analysis wipes away
the difference between a politics of democratic constitutionalism and a politics of
hostility and destruction. The question is about the unexamined political
consequences of the old university culture. Mannheim and his associates took a
responsible part in a reform for high stakes. Yet there was no magic button they
could push to block the rise of Hitler—inside the university too—and it is
offensive to suggest their complicity. World history is not the world court.
 Prepared for ‘‘Politisierung der Wissenschaft’: Jüdische, völkische und andere
Wissenschaftler an der Universität Frankfurt am Main”; Historisches Seminar der
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main: Mittwoch, 27.6.2012, bis Sonntag, 1.7.2012
Goethe-Universität
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