Examining the changes - or resistance to change - in the theorizing, research, and professional practices of German-speaking emigré psychologists after 1933 presents an important opportunity to learn about the impact of culturally conditioned scientific and professional styles in this discipline. Recent studies of historical and contemporary scientific practices have sensitized us to their rootedness in more local and situational as well as national cultural contexts. In psychology, too, conceptions of both scientific and professional subject matter and practices differed by culture, although the differences were often gradual rather than absolute, and there were local variations within each national style.

In German-speaking Europe, both limited opportunities for new disciplines in the established system of higher education and the knowledge interests of experimenting psychologists themselves made it opportune for them to compete for professorships in philosophy, which in turn influenced their research priorities toward philosophically relevant topics in human cognition. In the 1920s, philosophically oriented experimental psychology participated fully in the struggle of competing world-views characteristic of that time; it also lived in uneasy balance with varied attempts to transform the field into a science-based profession, and to expand its subject matter and methodological options accordingly.

Many emigration specialists maintain that the loss of approximately 2,000 scientists by Germany between 1933 and 1945 completely shattered that country's basis for scientific research. A reduction of a country's scientific brainpower by more than 30 percent, it is argued, could not fail to produce a disastrous effect on the content as well as the quality of research pursued within that country's scientific institutions. A plethora of purported facts, scholarly expositions, and historical documents appear to prove this point beyond reasonable doubt. A comprehensive synopsis of the historical process in question is, however, unavailable. Moreover, any consolidated evaluation of its global effects on the growth, content, and international standing of the sciences in the countries of emigration and immigration will have to await further research.

The present situation in the field of emigration studies is perhaps best characterized by the following features:

• An abundance of either loosely connected or unrelated facts concerning Nobelists and other celebrated scientists profiting from the nonrandom survival of rich archival resources related to their work.

• Select records and analyses of some salient institutions, and of a few probably atypical specialties, again depending on the vicissitudes of available archival data.

• Very occasional information about the development of personal networks, or schools of research, involving emigrants.

• Virtually nothing, except for “thin descriptions,” of a testable kind concerning more universal categories of science such as disciplines, fields or specialties.

All together, such features yield a picture of too many open questions, too many extrapolations or other unfounded speculations derived from cases whose typicality is uncertain, too many isolated facts that constitute pieces of the puzzle but leave the larger picture blurry and indiscernible.

The so-called “Law for the Reconstitution of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933, which authorized the dismissal or premature retirement from government service of persons who were not of “Aryan” descent or who were associated with groups considered politically undesirable in the new German state, was only the beginning of a massive, forced exodus mainly of Jewish scholars and scientists from Nazi Germany. Some particularly prescient intellectuals had already fled when the Reichstag burned in February of that year. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the invasion of Austria in March and the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, and finally the Nazi conquests in the rest of Europe made the emigration of scientists and scholars a mass phenomenon unprecedented in the modern history of academic life. Compared with the total of more than half a million refugees from Germany alone, the fate of approximately 2,000 academics and research scientists may seem of modest concern, but not when we remember how innovative some of these scholars and scientists were or became. Nonetheless, skeptical voices have been raised, asking among other things whether these innovations were indeed the results of emigration, or whether they might have occurred in any case. Did that “exodus of reason” in fact lead to significant scientific change, and if so, how should that change be characterized? The essays in this book attempt to provide answers to these questions, and thus to contribute to the comparative study of science in culture.

In 1953, Franz L. Neumann, a veteran of the OSS and the author of a well acclaimed study of National Socialism, surveyed the lives of other refugees who, like himself, had fled Hitler for the United States. Tenured at Columbia, Neumann identified three categories among his colleagues in exile, distinguished refugees, aptly labeled by Laura Fermi “illustrious immigrants.” In the first category, Neumann placed those individuals who clung desperately to their pasts, refusing to enter the New World. In the second category, he placed those who bid adieu to their old ways of thinking and embraced, often without a backward glance, the culture of their new home. In the third category, the “most rewarding” and “most difficult,” Neumann placed those individuals who wove together strands of the “new experience” with those of the “old tradition.”

Neumann's viewpoint, that of an émigré who had succeeded admirably within the academic establishment, lent credence to his analysis. In the nearly forty years since he penned his essay “The Social Sciences,” little if any revision has been visited upon his delineations. Instead, students of the migration - led by H. Stuart Hughes and Lewis Coser - have welcomed his categories as a means of understanding the lives and works not only of refugee social scientists but of the intellectual migration in general.

The history of the institutional development of modern economics as a discipline and its intellectual history has yet to be fully investigated. What we do know comes mostly from outsiders to the “brotherhood,” who have to a great extent limited their explorations of the past to the question of how knowledge was promoted by key figures in the field. The fact that the “sciences” - as defined by Thomas Kuhn - also represent complex social processes of change, defined by a variety of factors within science and outside it, has remained unnoticed. The topic of dismissal and emigration” of economists from Nazi Germany, the turning points in their lives and careers, as well as the problems of acculturation in their adopted countries, however, can hardly be illustrated by an approach that focuses on the history of economic analysis, with its interest in the linear accumulation of knowledge.

An initial glance at the list of émigré economists reveals several peculiarities. Many of the emigrants came from the same universities. In my study on the New School for Social Research, which, in its rescue programs in the years 1933 through 1940, granted asylum to a great number of expelled scientists, I have pointed out that this institution sheltered, above all, scholars from the so-called “Kiel School” and from the University of Heidelberg. A systematic survey of the dismissals from German universities (see Table 8.1) now shows that the number of ousted scholars who later emigrated was generally the highest in the departments of economics at those two centers and at the University of Frankfurt.

Discussions of the emigration of refugee physicians and medical scientists have concentrated on a select number of outstanding researchers. Less attention has been paid to the interaction with the host academic cultures, to professional structures, and to the potential of those refused entry or career posts. Selective criteria applied at the time in the admission of emigrants have continued - with rare exceptions - to dominate the historiography of the emigration. It is all too easy to overlook the socially marginal: Certain academics came as domestic servants or gardeners, and pursued careers in fringe industrial laboratories or in general practice.

Professional factors are of special importance in the medical sphere. Restrictive professional barriers were erected for the exclusion of the rank and file of clinicians. Lord Dawson, president of the Royal College of Physicians, instructed the home secretary that “the number [of German medical scientists] who could teach us anything could be counted on the fingers of one hand.” While the Royal College of Physicians spoke for the elite of the medical profession, there was a rift between the profession and medical researchers. Long-running tensions between scientific modernizers and the traditional professional elite explain the strong medical research lobby within the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) who keenly sympathized with the plight of German medical researchers. A modernizing elite of physiologically trained researchers was attempting to reform the system of medical education and professional structures. Physiologists and biochemists such as Henry Dale, A.V. Hill, and Gowland Hopkins were key figures in both the Medical Research Council and the SPSL.

In 1944, in “Psychoanalysis and Sociology,” Heinz Hartmann, who would be the leading psychoanalyst for years to come, stated that many problems belonging to the social sciences must be examined with the help of psychoanalysis. By 1950, he argued for the creation of a common conceptual language for the social sciences, in order to define sociological problems in terms of their psychological meaning and, vice versa, to formulate psychological ones in direct relation to the social structure. The following year, at a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Section of the American Psychiatric Association, Talcott Parsons, the leading American sociologist, stated that the influence of psychoanalysis had “deepened and enriched the understanding of human motivation and had become pervasive in the social sciences.”

Only fifteen years before, Rudolph Loewenstein, who would become Hartmann's co-author of the most central concepts in so-called American ego psychology, which would come to dominate psychoanalysis worldwide, had taken what we would consider the most standard “biological” approach, which he had based squarely on the Oedipus complex. How did Loewenstein get from his classification of the four phases in the development of male sexuality that “normally constitute the genital automatism” - desire, erection, ejaculation, orgasm - to his “pertinent propositions for interdisciplinary cooperation?” How come that already by 1949 he was accepting and defining “instinctual drive not [as] identical with the one used in animal psychology, but [as] a construct particularly designed to describe the phenomena of conflict in man which psychoanalysis studies? Simply put, what had led him to broaden the notion of “biology?”

James Franck (1882-1964) was a renowned, Nobel Prize-winning director of a world-class physics institute when the National Socialists came to power. For half a century he had lived as a Jew among the Germans, and for three decades he had worked as a German among the world's scientists. His life changed irrevocably when in April 1933 he publicly resigned his university position in political protest against the policies of the new regime.

Yet in another important sense, the patterns of a lifetime could not and did not change overnight. The characteristics of personality and intellect that had made Franck so successful were not shattered. If anything, they were further fused in the crucible of dramatic change. Yet in being applied to new conditions they faced unexpected challenges. Here lies one value of the biographical approach, for the mixture of stability and instability in the life of a single person underscores the complexity of emigration at every scale of analysis.

One of the striking aspects of Franck's life was his frequent role as a mediator across social and disciplinary boundaries, especially those of German-Jewish identity and of theoretical-experimental styles of scientific research. It was not that he stood on one side reaching out to the other, but that he positioned himself in the midst of complex interactions and reached out to both sides. He was therefore accustomed to tuning his hearing to the differing vocabularies and values among his friends, acquaintances, students, co-workers, and peers. He was also accustomed to shifting his position constructively in response to the mainstream of activity around him. Both habits were to stand him in excellent stead when he was forced to depart Germany.

In this chapter, I will first sketch an outline of a topic that has as yet never been investigated in its entirety: the emigration of German political scientists (Staats- und Politikwissenschaftler) after the Nazis came to power. Although it may seem surprising that this topic has been neglected since several of the most prominent and interesting academic émigrés belong to this group, the reasons for this omission are easy to identify. We are dealing with a field of academic emigration in which one is from the very beginning confronted with the full complexity inherent in the application of the concept of acculturation to the history of disciplines. Even the German term Staatsund Politikwissenschaft represents a dubious compromise, and is a mere makeshift solution to the problem that Staatswissenschaft, as it existed in the Weimar Republic, can by no means be translated simply into “political science.” Furthermore, there is no guarantee that it is even possible to construct a unified, clear social or institutional history of this discipline, whatever its name may be, not least because politics, which follows a logic of its own, persistently intervenes. In short, a point that applies to the most recent research, especially insofar as it is inspired by the International Biographical Dictionary of Central European émigrés, 1933-1945, will probably become an even greater problem for political science - every quantitative method, no matter how refined it might be, is doomed to failure unless it is accompanied by intense qualitative analysis of the group being studied.

ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF PALLIATION

Despite so great an ordeal, Naples survived. The plan developed by the municipal giunta lay in ruins, but the city nevertheless weathered the crisis. Part of the explanation for this endurance was a feature of the disease itself – one of the great ‘cholera mysteries’ that characterize the history of this exotic pestilence. For reasons still insufficiently understood, epidemic cholera is self-limiting. Thus in Naples the epidemic began by rapidly and violently destroying those individuals who were most at risk. It then began slowly to subside after the catharsis of mid-September. The circle of its victims narrowed, and the rate of mortality declined. By the end of September it no longer appeared that the city was being inexorably annihilated. The medical crisis was slowly abating. In October the daily bills of mortality were almost comforting, so marked was the contrast with the preceding weeks. Figures that, in August, would have created panic, brought relief after the experience of September. Although the outburst continued into early November, the official daily number of deaths never again climbed as high as ninety. There began instead a slow descent into single digits.

Imperceptibly, tensions in the city followed the downward curve of mortality. With fewer cases a day, conflicts became less frequent, the hospital service improved, the cemetery kept pace with the smaller number of cadavers, and scenes of horror grew steadily rarer. Terror itself began to subside.

The Crosses – White and Red

The spontaneous decline of the epidemic force of the disease, however, is only one aspect of the gradual return to near-normality that occurred in October.

The week, twenty-five years ago, of the Apollo spacecraft's return visit to the moon was described by Richard Nixon as the greatest since the Creation. Across the Atlantic, a French Academician judged the same event to matter less than the discovery of a lost etching by Daumier. Attitudes to technological achievement, then, differ. And they always have. Chuang-Tzu, over 2,000 years ago, relates an exchange between a Confucian passer-by and a Taoist gardener watering vegetables with a bucket drawn from a well. ‘Don't you know that there is a machine with which 100 beds are easily watered in a day?’—‘How does it work?’—‘It's a counter-balanced ladle’—‘Too clever to be good… all machines have to do with formulae, artificiality [which] destroy native ingenuity… and prevent the Tao from residing peacefully in one's heart’. ‘Engines of mischief’, in the words of the Luddite song, or testaments to ‘the nobility of man [as] the conqueror of matter’, in those of Primo Levi, the products of technology continue to inspire phobia and philia.

Familiar to the point of cliché, in such debates, has been the rhetoric of liberation and enslavement. Karl Popper judges nuclear power to have shown that our vaunted ‘control of nature’ is ‘apt to enslave us rather than make us free’; while, for Radhakrishnan, further east, the technology by which man ‘strove to emancipate himself from bondage to nature’ has now become ‘the master’.

Neapolitan experience between 1884 and 1911 vindicates Asa Briggs and Louis Chevalier in their early insight that Asiatic cholera was a major transformative experience in the societies it affected, linking the history of medicine to the broader concerns of political, social, cultural and urban history. The ravages of the city of Naples in this period constitute an ideal test case for such a perspective because they occur so late. The fifth and sixth pandemics that mark the boundaries of this study were unlike the dramatic events of the 1830s that have most attracted historians. By the time the infection broke out in the boroughs of Porto and Mercato in the summer of 1884, it was an all too familiar visitor; its aetiology was largely understood; the mortality it caused had greatly diminished; and the medical and political authorities of the day understood the preventive measures that needed to be taken to prevent further epidemics. In 1910 and 1911 cholera could even be described as a disease whose time had passed because highly effective means existed to prevent, contain and treat it.

Even in such circumstances, cholera had a major impact on the history of the city. A major reason in 1884 is what might be termed its moral chronology. Morally, the epidemic of that year was the first for which the new Liberal regime could be held responsible. United Italy had already been devastated by a major epidemic of cholera in the 1860s. At that early date, however, the overthrow of the ancien régime was too recent and the new order too precariously established for it to be held accountable for the conditions that promoted Asiatic cholera.

PROLOGUE: THE INVASION OF APULIA

By the time of the renewed threat to Naples in 1910, the local and national authorities had long anticipated the return of Asiatic cholera. The sixth pandemic began its ravages in 1899 in Bengal. It then moved relentlessly westward along two established bacterial highways. To the north the disease followed the trade routes to the Punjab, Afghanistan and Persia. Crossing the Caspian Sea, it journeyed up the Volga to Moscow and the west. At the same time the cholera moved in a second, more southerly direction, travelling overland to Bombay and Madras; then by sea to Ceylon and Jeddah. It then accompanied the pilgrims to Mecca in 1902 and dispersed with them across the Red Sea to Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa.

The Department of Public Health in the Ministry of the Interior anxiously followed this westward movement and sounded the alarm in 1904, when cholera invaded the Russian Empire and developed into a full-scale epidemic. In the summer of 1905 the Ministry recorded outbreaks in Poland, Germany and the Hapsburg Empire, and observed that Italy was in clear danger. The authorities identified the Austrian border, Apulia and the ports of Naples and Genoa as particularly vulnerable. In September 1905 the Ministry of the Interior declared that Italy was now on a sanitary war-footing because the arrival of the disease on Italian soil was ‘not just probable, but imminent’.

As the Ministry had feared, the Vibrio cholerae reached Italy in the summer of 1910, claiming its first victims on the Adriatic coastline of Apulia that the authorities had identified as a locality of special risk.