An Interrupted Past

More subjective than many of the other essays in this exploration, the shards of memory that follow offer at best a worm's-eye view of the presence and impact of the émigré historian. Mine is the perspective of a student of yesteryear looking up, not of the historical scholar of today looking back. If this attempt at Rezeptionsgeschichte based on personal recollection alone has any justification here, it is twofold: First, that it may point to the swiftly changing context of American political and academic culture of the 1930s and 1940s in which the professional influence of the émigrés was exercised. Second, that it may remind us of the power of the émigrés in the formation of the American student's mental outlook in areas lying well beyond purely professional historical education.

We sometimes forget how much time passed before émigré scholars secured a foothold in American colleges and universities. Even among those who left Germany immediately after Hitler's seizure of power, many spent some years in France or England before finally reaching our shores. Such was the case with all those who became my respected older friends and informal mentors: Fritz Epstein, Felix Gilbert, Hajo Holborn, Herbert Marcuse, and Franz Neumann. Of course, once they reached these shores their often painful search for a position in a depressed academic market further retarded the construction of new careers, the securing of the very institutional foundations of their influence.