Reminiscences of a UFO

Summary

MY CONTRIBUTION WILL CONSIST OF two parts: my response to Professor Seeba of whose paper I have been shown only a small fraction prior to this session; and, invited to do so by Meike Werner, I shall try to give an account of how I deal with the anti-Semitism in my chosen field of learning.

Professor Seeba, whom I have known for a long time and for whose work I have the highest respect, has sketched the role refugee scholars from Nazi Europe played in our field of learning. One could and should expand this focus to include many other disciplines, for example psychoanalysis, art history, empirical sociology, and many others. It would not be difficult to argue that the atomic bomb that helped establish American hegemony in the world and ushered in a whole new phase in human history was the work of scientists driven out of Europe by the fascists. It is unthinkable what the world would be like had they done this for Germany as many would have without the insane racial phantasies of the Nazis.

With regard to the narrower field of German, Hinrich Seeba is right to say that many of the refugees were uncomfortable with theory. Some of the more prominent ones had been successful or at least frustrated writers of poetry, drama, and fiction in Europe. As such, their guiding principles had been Bildlichkeit and Anschaulichkeit, the expression of ideas in the form of images and a rhetoric of persuasion. Thus, publications of Bernhard Blume, Oskar Seidlin, Heinz Politzer, and Erich Heller, to name only a few, were jargon-free masterpieces of elegance in addition to their indisputable scholarly merits. It wouldn’t harm our profession if their academic great-grandchildren emulated this achievement. Perhaps our much-lamented isolation wouldn’t be so complete. Oskar Seidlin and Erich Heller had already made a start breaking down the barriers that separated the field of German from the general intellectual life of America.

I especially endorse Professor Seeba’s call for individual biographies. I have my own difficulties with abstract universals. While they are helpful in bringing some order into the chaos of the phenomenal world, they only seem correct in areas we know little about. Where one has a pretty good grasp of what is the case, generalizations seem to pale.