Teaching Career
In addition to the actual work in science in which I try to participate as far as my powers permit, I have for fifty years functioned as a teacher. My teaching experience started in high school. Since we were poor, I had to get some minimum pocket money by way of tutoring other high school students who were the children of more affluent parents but did not match their material affluence with intelligence and industriousness. This kind of work continued until I finished high school. When I started work at the university, I had the good luck of getting a job as a volunteer assistant in the Handelsvereinigung-Ost, an Austrian-Ukrainian enterprise that had grown out of the occupation of the Ukraine by the Central European powers during World War I. One of the students whom I had tutored was the son of the secretary general of the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna, who saw to it that I got this job, which, though very low paying, enabled me to continue my studies. Very soon after I got acquainted with the professors at the university in seminars, there opened up the possibility of a teaching position, with a very, very small salary, at the Volkshochschule Wien-Volksheim. This institution was an adult education project sponsored by the Socialist government of the city of Vienna, where the students were the intellectually more alert and industrious radicals from the workers’ environment. I must stress the “intellectually more alert,” because the less-alert stratum of workers entering the political process was of course taken care of by the trade-union training courses. The Volkshochschule was something like a university for workers as well as lower-middle-class young people.
In this environment I learned to discuss and debate. At the time I accepted the job, I had already gone far beyond my three months of Marxism in the summer of 1919, and now I was facing these rather radical Socialists, most of them probably outright Communists. Since the subjects I had to teach were political science and the history of ideas, wild debates immediately ensued in which I could not give in or I would have lost my authority. During these years a permanent good relationship developed between the young radicals and myself, and I continued this kind of work after I came back from America and France in 1927, until I was removed by the National Socialists in 1938. Though the conflict between the young Marxists and my first attempts at being a scientifically oriented scholar was always strongly articulate, the personal relations were the best. After the lecture and seminar hours in the evening, after nine o’clock, the group always got together and continued the discussions in one of the numerous coffeehouses in the neighborhood. I still remember a scene in the 1930s when, after a wild debate resulting in disagreement, one of these young fellows, not so very much younger than I was myself, with tears in his eyes told me, “And when we come to power we have to kill you.”
This little incident is perhaps the occasion for another story that characterizes the Austrian social climate. After the Social Democratic uprising in 1934, certain Social Democratic leaders were arrested and put in jail for a short while, not for very long. But one of them, the famous Max Adler, their chief ideologist, was not arrested. That was a horrible blow to his self-esteem, because now the government had attested what everybody knew—that he was politically an entirely unimportant figure. Friends of Max Adler, who after all was a colleague of mine in the Law Faculty, asked me on occasion whether I could not do something through my equally good relations with the other side to get him arrested for a little while, so that he would not be so terribly sad and downhearted. I actually talked with one of my colleagues, who was a high government official and was at the same time teaching administrative law at the university, and asked whether the government could not arrest Adler for at least the forty-eight hours permitted under the habeas corpus provisions before they had to release him. We talked about the matter; he was very obliging and courteous. He said that he understood Adler’s situation perfectly well, and since he was also a colleague of his in the same faculty he would like to do what he could to accommodate him, but he was afraid no one could do anything. If Adler were arrested, the government would make itself ridiculous, because everybody knew that Max Adler was unimportant. He really could not oblige him.
My good relations with these young radicals lasted well into the Nazi period. They became even more intense in the 1930s because everybody knew that if I was not a Communist, I was still less a National Socialist. When the blow of the occupation fell, I was able to help some of these radicals with letters of recommendation for their flight to safer areas, like Sweden. At the University of Vienna, however, where I began to teach as a Privatdozent in 1929, relations with the students were fraught with tensions because these students came from middle-class homes, they were not workers, and the intellectually more active ones were to a considerable degree affected by the German nationalism rampant in that middle class, as well as by anti-Semitism. There were no open conflicts, but relations were not warm. In 1938, when the National Socialist occupation came, I observed that quite a number of the students whom the day before I had had in my seminar on administrative procedure donned the black uniform of the SS.
For a real experience with Central European students, as distinguished from young worker-radicals, I can speak only for the years of my professorship in Munich from 1958 to 1969. Because I had been called to Munich to organize a hitherto nonexistent Institute of Political Science, I had to acquire first of all a couple of assistants who would help in building up a library and taking care of the quite considerable number of students who flocked into the lecture courses and the seminars. From these beginnings, with a number of completely empty rooms that had to be filled with library shelves and books on the shelves, there developed the institute that lasted until I left in 1969. Gradually a body of students grew who themselves became an educative force for other students attracted to political science. The results of these eleven years must be described as a considerable success. In the first place, there was the institute as a physical establishment, with a first-rate library—a collection that covered new developments in the historical sciences, not only in German but above all in English and French. Special attention was given to the various areas that are basic for the understanding of Western culture—that is, to Classic philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity; the sections on modern history and modern political ideas had to be brought up to date as quickly as possible; and new developments in prehistory, in the ancient Near East, China, India, and Africa, as well as new archeological discoveries, had to be taken care of. The library became famous and was extensively used by young scholars from other fields because it was the best all-around library for developments in the contemporary sciences of man and society.
The young people also did well, and we began publishing monographs representing the work of the institute. The most important of these series is the Schriftenreihe zur Politik und Geschichte, published by the List Verlag in Munich, now running over ten volumes. Of the areas and problems covered, I mention the work by Peter Weber-Schaefer on the Chinese ecumene, by Peter J. Opitz on Lao-tse, and by Peter von Sivers on the political theories of Ibn-Khaldun. There were further studies dealing mostly with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western intellectual history, and monographs by Manfred Henningsen on Toynbee’s A Study of History, by Michael Naumann on Karl Kraus, by Eckard Kolberg on LaSalle, by Hedda Herwig on Freud and Jung, by Tilo Schabert on the symbolisms of nature and revolution in the French eighteenth century, and by Dagmar Herwig on Robert Musil. To these years also belongs the work by Professor Ellis Sandoz on Dostoevsky, whose book first came out as a Ph.D. dissertation in Munich.1 During the ten years, the first-comers in the institute grew older and became independent. Three of them—Peter J. Opitz, Manfred Henningsen, and Jürgen Gebhardt—became the highly active editors of a paperback Geschichte des politischen Denkens, of which some eleven volumes have come out by now. Peter Opitz has also become the editor of a volume of collected essays on Chinese revolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Communist movement. Others who entered the institute later from other fields have also produced interesting new studies. I should like to mention Klaus Vondung and his book on Magie und Manipulation. The older ones among the younger people who started working with me are now themselves in professional positions, or near them, and the aggregate of the group and its work has become a distinct force on the German intellectual scene—though I cannot say that this particular group and its force are loved by the ideologists, left or right.
I am frequently asked about my experiences regarding the difference between European and American students. There are marked differences but not of such a nature that I should say that one type is preferable to the other. They have their peculiarities. With the Germans, I found a very high degree of background knowledge that facilitated their progress to independent work in science. The people whom I admitted to my seminars, and especially the ones who became assistants and conducted their own seminars, had a knowledge of at least one Classical language and of course were able to read German, French, and English fluently. Some of them had additional knowledge of languages in their particular field. The Islamists, for instance, had under the regulations of the university to have a good knowledge of Arabic and Turkish; the students dealing with Far Eastern affairs had to know Chinese and Japanese in addition to the Western languages. That made for a group of highly educated, intellectually alert young people who certainly helped each other in the sharp contest of competitive debate of problems. One of their favorite games, of course, was to catch me out on some technical mistake, but unfortunately I could offer them the pleasure only rarely.
The American students belonged to widely different types. In Louisiana there was a considerable cultural background provided by the Catholic parochial schools. I had students in my courses who knew Latin and who took courses in Thomist philosophy with the Catholic chaplain at Louisiana State University. That of course helped. The average students, I should say, did not have the background knowledge one would expect of European students, but they had instead something that the European, especially the German, students usually lack—a tradition of common-sense culture. In the South especially, the problem of ideological corruption among young people was negligible. The students were open-minded and had little contact with ideological sectarian movements. My experiences in the East were less favorable. The ideological corruption of the East Coast has affected the student mind profoundly, and occasionally these students betray the behavioral characteristics of totalitarian aggressiveness. A great number of students simply will not tolerate information that is not in agreement with their ideological prejudices. I frequently had difficulties with students of this type. Still, on the whole, even the so-called radical students, short of the hard-core militants, can be handled by swamping them with mountains of information. They still have enough common sense to be aware that their own ideas must bear some relation to the reality surrounding them; and when it is brought home to them that their picture of reality is badly distorted, they do not become easy converts but at least they begin to have second thoughts. I cannot say the same of radical students in Germany, who simply start shouting and rioting if any serious attempt is made to bring into discussion facts that are incompatible with their preconceptions.
During the years in Louisiana, my wife and I acquired our American citizenship. There was an amusing detail. The Department of Justice, in charge of immigration procedures, had issued a little book that formulated the principal questions that could be asked and the answers one had to give. I noticed that the Department of Justice, in spite of Roosevelt and the war, was still quite conservative—the American form of government was a republic; if you said it was a democracy you were wrong. I believe these questionnaire leaflets have by now been changed.
So far as my faculty position in Louisiana is concerned, I advanced from associate professor to full professor with tenure, and ultimately I became one of the first Boyd Professors, together with T. Harry Williams, when the university introduced these professorships in order to pay higher salaries to some scholars whose services they wanted to retain. Still, when in the second half of the 1950s I was offered the professorship in Munich, I did not refuse. There were several reasons. In the first place, I could organize my own institute and train young scholars who would continue the work that I had initiated. Second, at the time the salary in Munich was higher than the salary in Louisiana. Third, old friends like Alois Dempf, the historian and philosopher, had been highly instrumental in getting me to Munich, and I certainly had no objections to entering this very congenial intellectual and spiritual environment. Besides, the spirit of American democracy would be a good thing to have in Germany.
Under this last aspect, the beginnings were a bit difficult, because German students were not accustomed to speak up freely as American students do. Even those who became assistants had to be pushed very energetically into an attitude of personal independence that differed starkly from the very subordinate position in which assistants are kept in numerous cases by the old-style German professor. Not the least point of attraction the institute had for me was the group of young people who so signally differed in the behavior that I inculcated in them from the type of behavior preferred in other institutes in Munich. On the whole, however, I believe that the idea of injecting an element of international consciousness, and of democratic attitudes, into German political science has not been much of a success beyond the immediate circle of young people that I could train personally. As I later analyzed the situation in my lecture on the German university,2 the damage of National Socialism has been enormous. What one might call the universitarian upper stratum was simply killed off, partly through actual murder, so that the type of professors whom I met in 1929 in Heidelberg simply disappeared without leaving a younger generation trained by them. However, the universitarian middle and lower class survived in force; they now determine the general climate of the German universities, and that climate is mediocre and limited. The after-effects of National Socialism make themselves felt in the contemporary destruction of the German university through an invasion of the rabble from below to which the university personnel cannot offer any effective resistance because the authority of the great scholars in the universities disappeared with the scholars themselves. The general prospects, therefore, I consider very dubious.
When I say the prospects are dubious, I mean that in fact the active operation of the universities, especially in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities, has been widely destroyed through the famous democratization, especially through the participatory democracy, which means in fact that nobody is permitted to do his work in peace. In a case like Berlin, for instance, leftist students simply do not permit anybody who is not a Marxist to open his mouth; and I hear that a similar situation exists in places like Marburg. Munich was fortunately preserved from the worst effects, partly because my institute there was a stronghold of nonideological science. I should like to stress this point because people sometimes underrate the effect a professor can have, not by throwing his weight around but by educating in his courses and seminars two or three annual classes of students who then become an effective propaganda force against ideologists among the other students. That of course will wear off if an energetic attitude is not maintained, or if it is made ineffective by rapidly increasing the staff, so that the institute becomes dominated by mediocre people who cannot properly resist radical students in debate.
1. Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, 2nd ed. (1971; Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2000).
2. First published in 1966; English trans., 1985; reprinted in CW, vol. 12, as chap. 1; cf. also Hitler and the Germans, CW, vol. 31.