Europeans Bearing Gifts

...A smaller number —roughly a hundred—were so gifted, original, charismatic, and persuasive that they transformed the intellectual and artistic landscape of the country...

...Horney, a ripe and ruddy Valkyrie, would delicately puff a Parliament cigarette balanced on a thin metal holder as she located the reported neurosis in family relations warped by religious or cultural strictures...

...Nonetheless, it is well taken: Americans have traditionally had a high regard for European scholarship...

...Its omissions notwithstanding, Refugee Scholars in America is a work of formidable breadth that could well serve the nonspecialist as a reliable (though selective and personalized) introduction to contemporary social thought...

...Coser writes: "Schooled in the tradition of German Romanticism and Hegelian-ism and beholden to a historicist tradition that rejected all absolutist interpretations in favor of what he called' historical perspectivism,' Auerbach developed a complex interpretive scheme for the literary depiction of the self-interpretation of Western literature.' To which one's natural response is, "Huh...

...While I admire Refugee Scholars in America for its ambition, its concise treatment of biographical details, and its intimate tracing of academic movement and reputation, I find Coser's attempts to summarize complex ideas terribly uneven...

...In each of the fields covered, from psychology and sociology to economics and linguistics, European refugees helped change the direction of American scholarship...

...He is excellent on Bruno Bettelheim and Arendt, but almost impenetrable on the Gestalt psychologists and on Roman Jacobson's linguistics...

...He is admirably responsive and fair in his book, however, when he deals with scholars of a strongly conservative bent...

...A related evidence of Coser's German-centered perspective is his failure even to mention Isaac Bashevis Singer in his section on refugee writers...

...A student (later a colleague) of political scientist Franz Neumann at Columbia thought that "he embodied in his own person the vitality and drama of intellectual life...

...At what stage was American scholarship most receptive to European contributions...

...and Leo Strauss' rejection of post-Enlightenment relativism and return to the absolute values of classical philosophy, the source of much of the ideological grounding for neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and James Q. Wilson...

...I suspect that Coser's difficulty is related to a wider Germanic intellectual penchant for abstract and linguistically muddy concepts as somehow more serious and profound than those accessible to the uninitiated, the philosophically unwashed...

...Add to these factors the frenzied expansion of higher education in the postwar period when millions of veterans poured in under the GI Bill, and you have a likely explanation of the sudden opening up of even elite universities to native Jewish teachers...

...One of the ironic aspects of refugee influence is that it began in a period when discrimination against Jews was fairly prevalent in American universities...

...Things have turned around phenomenally in rcccnt decades, and 1 would venture that the influx of a talented cohort of Jewish refugees played a catalytic role...

...Although Coser does not seriously engage this issue, aside from some passing references to genteel anti-Semitism, he raises some interesting questions about the European-American interaction...

...Coser makes the apparently obvious observation that those refugees who were willing to integrate themselves into American society tended to find the best posts and to have the greatest influence...

...scholarship abreast of the mainstream of sophisticated European thought...

...In any event, hundreds of Jewish refugee scholars of various levels of distinction secured posts in universities across the country...

...architecture and design in the postwar decades...

...Erik Erikson's theory of distinct stages of development in the life cycle, and his concept of the adolescent "identity crisis...

...I remember my own intoxicating initiation into the refugee style at a New School seminar on psychoanalysis where Erich Fromm and Karen Horney would comment on a current case outlined by a visiting analyst...

...Others were so accustomed to being birds of flight that they found it hard to accept the permanence of their new perches...

...Then he adds a qualification, arguing that precisely the "marginal" location of the refugees, socially and intellectually, gave them a critical vantage point not available to those Americans "born and bred in the pieties of their tradition.' A refugee's academic success was not necessarily an indication of his or her intellectual impact, as we can see from the career of Hannah Arendt...

...Compounding this unavoidable decline in status, the distinguished newcomers were at first usually offered temporary jobs at low salaries (these were Depression years) in universities where casual student manners and polite anti-Semitism made them uneasy...

...His interests are rather the political and social backgrounds of his subjects, the contrast between European and American university settings, and the ways in which refugee intellectuals mediated the clash of custom and doctrine...

...Thus he excludes such younger luminaries as historian Peter Gay and sociologists Reinhard Bendix and himself, for while born and raised in Germany, they launched their academic careers only after reaching the United States...

...Coser has long been associated with the Socialist Left—he was co-founder, with Irving Howe, of Dissent...

...A more serious lapse of another kind is Coser's failure to cite the one other work that covers the samesubject, Laura Fermi's Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930-41, published in 1968...

...But Coser clearly did not intend his book to be a primer of the social sciences...

...Too often he resorts to socio-jargon instead of translating theories into accessible common language...

...composers like Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schonberg, and Darius Milhaud, who made dissonance and primitive rhythms respectable, if not widely palatable, in the concert hall...

...He refers to psychological "action schemes" and "differential inclinations" without any gloss...

...Hannah Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Bliicher, felt it was unbecoming for people like them to have an apartment with their own furniture, so for many years they too suffered uncomfortable hotel accommodations...

...she never held a permanent university post, whereas many who gained tenure and high salaries made no significant dent...

...Fermi is not nearly as thorough or knowledgeable as Coser in discussing social scientists, but the rest of Illustrious Immigrants nicely complements Coser's focus and is written with great zest in an agreeably relaxed, discursive style...

...Professors in Germany and Austria were accustomed to a level of deference and status far beyond what was common in the United States...

...He goes beyond simply reminding us of a momentous recent episode of intellectual influence...

...I think I could not have been appointed at Columbia at that time [1939] if I had been an American Jew...

...Many of the new arrivals had the power to electrify the classroom...

...in the 1930s they also felt a humanitarian impulse to help the victims of Hitler's virulent bigotry...

...Some, like Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Theodor Ador-no (a musicologist as well as a Marxist sociologist), and a majority of the French and Italians, saw themselves as exiles ready to go back home as soon as political conditions allowed...

...Still, most of the refugees decided early ontomakethe United States their permanent home...

...Yet, despite neuroses and frustrations, the Europeans brought with them an ebullient historical sweep and a boldness of speculation that shook native Americans out of their pragmatic caution, their concern with the immediate and the statistical, their indifference to theory, and their comparative political innocence...

...On the other hand, a number of refugees , like Karen Horney and Franz Neumann, testified that the nonideological temper of American scholarship opened up paths of exploration that would have been impossible in the more polarized European setting...

...Lewis Coser concentrates his attention on 50 outstanding scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, already known for their work in Europe, who lived long enough on this side of the Atlantic to breed a new generation of influential disciples...

...About Erich Auerbach's famous study in comparative literature, Mimesis...

...Noone thought of me as a Jew because of my foreign-ness—the accent saved my life...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glick Former editor, "Dialogue" Of the 250,000 refugees who came to the United States from Europe between 1933-45, about 25,000 had worked in the professions...

...Not only did they prove to be less dangerous or problematic than had been feared by the wasp academic establishment, in many cases they became valued assets to a university, attracting brighter students and sought-after American professors...

...Conversely, what is it in American academic culture that has been most stimulating to Europeans...

...Coser does not discuss this, but he does cite a comment by Paul Lazarsfeld that seems to me to have more than personal application: "My being a foreigner overshadowed my being Jewish...

...performers like Artur Schnabel, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Joseph Szigeti, and Nathan Milstein...

...painters like Hans Hofmann, Joseph Albers, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, who were seminal forces behind the New York School of action painting and abstract expressionism...

...Since Lazarsfeld continued to feel insecure and marginal, even at the height of his eminence, he may have overstated the point...

...Hans Morgenthau's influential argument for "realism" in foreign policy, justifying the dominant role of "national interest" rather than moralistic rhetoric or legalisms...

...Written by the wife of atomic physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Enrico Fermi, it contains a superb treatment of the physical scientists omitted by Coser and touches as well on refugee artists, musicians, architects, and writers...

...He succeeds in making the world of ideas fascinating for its own sake, and simultaneously both illuminates and dignifies the personal sagas of this odd group of intellectual highflyers blown westward by a tragic series of events, which their work in the United States helped, at least partially, to redeem...

...We need simply remind ourselves that in the 1930s Lionel Trilling was the first Jew to get tenure, against considerable resistance by some colleagues, in Columbia's English Department...

...Because of his own background, Coser brings a special quality of empathy to his otherwise sober and sensible exposition of careers and ideas...

...Neoclassical economists on both sides of the Atlantic found that they spoke the same mathematical language and worked from the same standard texts...

...He can therefore describe with benign objectivity the discomforts, humiliations, resentments, and foibles of his fellow refugee scholars, many of whom he knows personally and has interviewed for this book...

...The answers seem to vary from discipline to discipline...

...His single lapse in this regard is to call Karl Witt-fogel, the eminent specialist in Chinese social history, a "violent" anti-Communist, when he meant "passionate" or "doctrinaire...

...The political scientist Arnold Brecht and his wife lived for decades in hotel rooms near New York's Central Park, cooking on a hot plate and washing their dishes in the bathroom...

...Coser's failure to mention Fermi, even in his end notes, contrasts poorly with her generous, sprightly bibliography...

...and the Bauhaus trio of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, whose doctrines of "form follows function" and "less is more" set the fashion for U.S...

...Albert O. Hirschman's astringent critique of the monolithic ideologies directing economic development in the Third World, an assessment that won him a significant following, particularly in Latin America...

...Nevertheless, on his own ground, the social sciences, Coser is unmatched in the literature of this migration...

...Paul Lazars-feld's almost single-handed introduction of methodological precision in social research, and especially in public opinion surveys, political or commercial...

...Yet whether marginal or establishment, Coser concludes, the refugees collectively achieved what one historian has called "the deprovincialization of the American mind," bringing U.S...

...American psychoanalysts, still at a fairly rudimentary stage, quickly realized that they needed the rigorous methodology and the theoretical daring of their European counterparts...

...They include Hannah Arendt's original analysis of totalitarianism, which shocked the Left by pointing to the structural similarities of Nazism and Stalinism in their attempt to atomize all traditional social bonds...

...Born in Berlin, he left Nazi Germany for Paris and the Sorbonne, then fled occupied France, arriving in the United States in 1941...

...Fromm, short and stocky, waving his ever-present pungent cigar for emphasis, would find instant political and historical analogies...

...He experienced the trauma of dislocation, of mastering a new language and culture, of finding one's way in U. S. academic politics—he is a past president of the American Sociological Association and now holds the chair of Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York...

...By 1965, some 2,000 of these—most of them Jews—had achieved sufficient intellectual distinction, including 21 Nobel Prizes, to be listed in Who's Who in America or similar reference works...

...He also excludes—on grounds of limited expertise—a galaxy of physicists and mathematicians unmatched in any other country or continent, among them Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, LeoSzilard, and John von Neumann...

...I can give merely the briefest hint here of the quality and scope of the pathbreaking contributions detailed in Coser's book...

...Nothing in my experiences at City College and Columbia had prepared me for the bravura performances of the Europeans, or the sense of intimacy with a rich Continental past, or the heady pleasure of intellectual adventure...

...and, more cynically, they could hope the refugees were mostly transient competitors who would someday return to their homelands...

...Apart from the drama, there was the substance of the refugee offerings...