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Transcript
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 1 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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 8 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, 9 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 10 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: 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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 15 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 16 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. 17 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 18 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 19