Exiles and Émigrés
THE BITTER AIR OF EXILE settled on New York in the war years, 1939–45, and made the city immeasurably more brilliant. As Virgil Thomson, in those years the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, recalls: “If America in the 1920s exiled its artists, the 1940s, especially their first half, saw a meeting of talent here, both foreign and domestic, that made us for the first time an international center for intellectuals.”
In October 1940, the Saturday Review of Literature published an issue devoted to “the Exiled Writers,” timed to coincide with a dinner for their benefit at the Hotel Commodore organized by Cass Canfield, Nelson Doubleday, Bennett Cerf, and other sympathetic publishers. Based on a somber oil painting by the Belgian-born Georges Schreiber, the magazine’s cover showed a bedraggled couple trudging against the wind in a cornfield, storm clouds overhead. Inside, a mix of exiled eminences and American best sellers—Jules Romains, Albert Einstein, André Maurois, Hermann Broch, and Wolfgang Köhler; Pearl S. Buck and Fannie Hurst contributed statements. Benjamin Appel, a young writer of leftist views known for tough-guy novels of the street with titles like Brain Guy and Runaround, went out on assignment to find the writers who had “got through” to New York.*1
“And the writers fled. Behind them, their books lit the sky from Germany to the Atlantic.” Appel’s prose is Popular Front purple; but then, the fall of 1940 was not the time for their American friends to understate the value of the cultural capital the exiles brought with them.*2 America was not at war, New York was a neutral city, and while the Nazis had few professed adherents, the great majority of Americans devoutly hoped that the European conflict would remain none of their affair. In the year before Pearl Harbor, most Americans, according to the polls, felt little sympathy with the European refugees. The whole lot, most especially the Jews, were thought to be burdensome people—actual or potential competitors for jobs if they were not candidates for relief in an economy still recovering from the Depression; needy people who in some obscure way were responsible for the plight in which they found themselves. The few so-called “refugees de Luxe,” who had escaped with means, were censured by a letter writer to Life magazine for crowding resort hotels and being rude and toplofty.
Appel found the novelist Jules Romains, author of the huge multivolume novel translated into English as The Men of Good Will, undaunted at fifty-five, by his present dislocation: “Hugo stayed eighteen years in exile and his most important work was Les Miserables, which is mostly full of French things.” Franz Werfel and his wife, the redoubtable Alma Mahler Werfel, had made a daring escape across the Pyrenees, during part of which they were hidden in Lourdes. Like Thomas Mann, Werfel had the knack of falling upstairs, if he had to fall. His latest novel, Embezzled Heaven, had already been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, enabling him to make his Atlantic crossing in style. Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian novelist awarded the Nobel Prize in 1928 for Kristin Lavransdatter and other historical fictions, was one of Alfred A. Knopf’s most popular European imports, along with Thomas Mann. She had fled occupied Norway with only a handbag, flying from Sweden to Moscow, traveling across Russia, voyaging to San Francisco via Japan, and then to New York. Soon after she left Norway her oldest son, Anders, was killed in an encounter with the Nazi occupiers. “All the events I think of—is Europe,” she told Appel. “Impossible—I can’t write a book—I don’t know.”
There was an honored place in New York for Wystan Hugh Auden, the most brilliant and influential poet of his generation in England and America, who strictly speaking was neither exile nor émigré nor refugee; rather, many in England bitterly said then and later, a defector, like his friend Christopher Isherwood and the novelist-sage Aldous Huxley. In “Refugee Blues” he made common cause with a situation far more dire than his own. He did not lack a passport, or a roof, or powerful friends like Bennett Cerf, his and Isherwood’s American publisher. Even though he had chosen his exile, he felt the loss that comes with dislocation: “In Europe, facts were concealed by tradition,” he told Appel. “The attractiveness of America to a writer is its openness and lack of tradition. In a way it’s frightening. You are forced to live here as everyone will be forced to live. There is no past. No tradition. No roots—that is in the European sense.”
The intellectual migration from the Europe of the dictators to America—catching up artists, intellectuals, scientists; architects, philosophers, art historians, composers; painters, physicists, publishers, and poets; playwrights, actors, opera singers, and impresarios—was an event in the history of culture and science whose influence, far from being exhausted almost eighty years after it began, continues to spread and circulate. The émigrés changed how Americans lit their movie sets, understood their motives, explained their elections; how they built and decorated their houses and skyscrapers and apartments; how they studied and collected art; how they painted, how they practiced science, and how they waged war. Did not a Hungarian émigré, Leo Szilard, persuade a German exile, Albert Einstein, to put his signature to the letter that first led Franklin Roosevelt to consider building an atomic bomb? And when that led to the construction of a secret city in New Mexico for the design of such a weapon, Los Alamos became perhaps the most fateful grouping of European minds to ever have come together in America, under the direction of a German-Jewish prodigy raised on Riverside Drive, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
As fascism spread and war was imminent, the arrival in New York of Einstein or Mann, Chagall or Dalí, Toscanini or Stravinsky, was front-page news. By 1939, the New York Times was comparing these distinguished refugees to the Greek scholars who sparked the Renaissance with their flight from Constantinople to Italy; in 1942 the American Mercury reviewed a show of “Artists in Exile” at Pierre Matisse’s gallery as “Hitler’s Gift to America.” But it seemed to require the distance of a generation to appreciate fully the significance of the “Great Migration.” It was only toward the end of the 1960s, as H. Stuart Hughes writes in The Sea Change (1975), when the older generation of émigrés had mostly died and the younger was in mid-career—when one part of the emigration had recrossed the ocean to be “Europeanized” and the other had stayed on to be “Americanized”—that the flight of the European intellectuals from fascism came to loom as “the most important cultural event—or series of events—of the second quarter of the twentieth century.”
The German-speaking group has been the most closely studied. In his classic Weimar Culture (1968), Peter Gay names Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Werner Jaeger, Wolfgang Köhler, Paul Tillich, and Ernst Cassirer as the outsiders who had become insiders during Weimar’s glorious, precarious day and then, sooner or later, became fugitives under the Nazis. Comparing their exile, again, to the flight of Greek scholars to Italy during the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the early fifteenth century, and also to the dispersal of the Huguenots from France and the foundation of New England by Puritan “refugees” in the seventeenth, Gay felt these intellectual migrations were overmatched by what he called “the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen.”
By count, 104,098 German and Austrian refugees entered the United States between January 1933 and December 1941, representing about two-thirds of the entire emigration from Europe. No other country came close to offering refuge to so many, but such were the obstacles they faced both in escaping from Europe and in entering the U.S. that the immigration quotas for their countries were actually unfulfilled during these years. As opposed to what Martin Jay has called “the silent majority” of exiles with whom historians are less likely to identify, and thus to write about, the Austro-German part of the “intellectual migration” consisted of 7,622 academics and about 1,500 artists and intellectuals of various description. About three-quarters were of “Jewish origin.” Out of Hungary came the “Budapest galaxy,” a wizardly band as brilliant and as various as the Austro-German: among them, the physicists Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner; the mathematician John von Neumann, the photojournalists André Kertész and Robert Capa; the novelist and controversialist Arthur Koestler; the movie producer Alexander Korda and director Michael Curtiz—the nine subjects of a book by Kati Marton—as well as the psychoanalyst Franz Alexander, the architect Marcel Breuer, and the historian John Lukacs, who came after the war. Prophetically, their great gathering place during Budapest’s “Golden Age” had been the opulent Café New York in the inner city.
It must not be forgotten that until after December 7, 1941, the refugees were arriving in a neutral city, where German officers in Nazi dress circulated freely, and Hitler’s victories and atrocities were cheered in particular moviehouses—witnessing such a spectacle at a theater in Yorkville turned W. H. Auden back into a Christian. Irwin Shaw’s story “Sailor Off the Bremen,” published in The New Yorker in 1939, captures this strange interval, which is recalled from a long distance by George Steiner, then a frighteningly precocious schoolboy at the French lycée, in his memoir, Errata. In A Life in the Twentieth Century, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., commends the accuracy of the atmosphere in John P. Marquand’s novel So Little Time (1943), in which the story is stolen by the protagonist’s friend, a bullying, rich boy, who is based on George Merck, the pharmaceutical heir, and who is forever saying, “Come the revolution!” from the back of his town car.
The “illustrious immigrants” comprised only a minute fraction of a continental flux of exiles, émigrés, and relatively anonymous refugees during the length of what has been called Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War, from 1914 to 1945. Millions fled as dictatorships were imposed from Portugal to Poland, as civil wars raged from Russia to Spain. For many of the intellectual emigrants who found their way there, New York was only the latest city of refuge, or “vast waiting room,” succeeding Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London. White Russian émigrés, for example, who had congregated in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution and then made their way to Paris in 1933–34, if they were lucky, crossed the Atlantic in a second, continental expatriation during and after the fall of France. Vladimir Nabokov, destined to be the most famous writer in the group, thought of his crossing more as a “homecoming.” The French emigration which Nabokov joined on the last ship from Cherbourg was smaller, more abruptly assembled, and destined to be briefer than the Central European.*3 The equally eminent but even smaller Italian emigration, including Salvador Luria, Arturo Toscanini, Enrico Fermi, and Renato Poggioli, assimilated brilliantly into the American scene; the Spanish, with centuries of practice at exile, kept their eyes on Iberia. Migration to the New World, which had been interrupted when the United States entered the war, was resumed for a few years after 1945 in the time of the Displaced Person.
America was big and various enough to be hospitable to both White and Red emigrations, almost always starting from a beachhead in New York City. Thus, at about the same time Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse began their American careers at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia, around 1940, Leo Strauss was a lecturer on starveling terms at the New School (1938–48); Ludwig von Mises became a professor at NYU in 1946; in 1949, Strauss moved to the University of Chicago, where he became the éminence grise of neo-conservatism; Marcuse’s fame as the intellectual godfather of the New Left found him at retirement age at the University of California at San Diego. There were, as it turned out, many places—honored, lofty places, very often—for the émigrés. As an older Auden sang:
American intellectuals of the 1930s and ’40s were Eurocentric; it seemed to be part of their calling. Had not the American writers most admired at Partisan Review—Henry James, T. S. Eliot—chosen to live abroad? On the other hand, the idea that Europe was the “biggest thing in North America,” as the poet-critic Delmore Schwartz liked to say—or that Manhattan was an island that yearned to merge with Russia, as Saul Bellow quotes Lionel Abel in Humboldt’s Gift—was a version of a conceit that only a native could indulge. To actual Europeans, New York on first impression presented itself as unreal, frighteningly grandiose, and overpowering. Surprisingly few of the Germans, for example, even those who were or had been rich or famous, had ever visited as tourists before they arrived as refugees. And since almost all came by sea across the Atlantic, it was what the German expressionist writer Leonhard Frank called “the grand silhouette of unreal, giant buildings” that prefigured the conditions of their existence—along with the Statue of Liberty, which most found anything but welcoming (although Maria Weiss, an imaginative poet, was reminded of Eleanor Roosevelt). The theme of the modern as the primordial occurs again and again. Thus, the novelist Hans Natonek marveled at how “the piled-up, monolithic hulks of the buildings resemble jagged meteorites cast down by awful forces of original creation”; the designer Eric Godal saw the skyline rising like “castles of the Cyclopes, unreal and terrifying.”
Christopher Isherwood, though he arrived with a reputation and the benefit of a previous visit, felt the same alarm when he and Auden returned as immigrants, faced with the prospect of earning a living in America. “God, what a terrifying place this suddenly seemed! You could feel it vibrating with the tension of the nervous New World, aggressively flaunting its rude steel nudity. We’re Americans here— and we keep at it, twenty-four hours a day, being Americans. We scream, we grab, we jostle. We’ve no time for what’s slow, what’s gracious, nice, quiet, modest.”
The sheer forbidding bulk of New York was both challenging and oddly reassuring—“for how could the country that manifested such great strength ever be endangered by the lunatic dictator from Branau?” True, H. G. Wells had imagined New York air-raided and laid waste by Germany as long ago as 1908, the Mexican moralist Orozco had painted its ruin, and in 1929 the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, visiting New York, had seen, or imagined he had seen, ruined millionaires leaping to their deaths. These imaginary examples of its destruction were noted by Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, after September 11, 2001. H. L. Mencken had also written an essay in this vein. “What will finish New York in the end, I suppose, will be an onslaught from without, not from within. The city is the least defensible of great capitals.” But such visions seemed almost as fantastic as Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem about a city doomed by termites that could feed on steel. The 1930s and early ’40s were the last time that New York City really seemed to be invulnerable.
The busyness of the harbor and the streets invigorated some, stunned others, and for almost everybody the first encounter with uniformed American authority at customs was apt to be fearful. Hans Natonek recalled unconsciously bending so far over for the inspection of his papers that he was suspected of having a “forbidden hunchback.” Anyone whose papers or person was doubtful was dispatched to Ellis Island for further inspection, where typically their treatment was “well organized, factual, with a reserved friendliness, devoid of emotion.” Vladimir Nabokov always remembered his first encounter with American officialdom as slapstick fun. He, his wife, Vera, and their six-year-old son, Dmitri, arrived “in the lilac mist of a May morning, May 1940,” on the Champlain, the ocean liner that had delivered Auden and Isherwood almost a year earlier, and was sunk off the coast of France a few weeks later when it struck a mine. At customs a nervous Vera forgot that the key to a padlocked trunk was in her jacket pocket. Nabokov “stood bantering,” as he later recalled, “with a diminutive Negro porter and two large Customs men until a locksmith arrived and opened the padlock with one blow of his iron hammer.”
The operation had to be repeated when the “merry little porter,” fascinated by the operation, fiddled with the padlock until it snapped shut again. At last reopened for inspection, the trunk revealed its topmost contents: two pairs of boxing gloves used for little Dmitri’s practice sessions. They were promptly snatched up by the customs men, who put them on and began to spar, circling about Nabokov. Attracted by the commotion, a third officer was fascinated by an album of butterfly specimens, even venturing a name for a species. “As Nabokov retold the story decades later,” Brian Boyd writes, “still enchanted by America’s easygoing, good-natured atmosphere, he repeated with delight: ‘Where would that happen? Where would that happen?’ ”
When Nabokov wondered aloud to Vera where he might buy a newspaper, one of the helpful customs men volunteered, “Oh, I’ll get one for you,” and returned with the New York Times. When their contacts in America, a Russian relation and an English friend, failed to appear, the Nabokovs, released by the authorities into the rush and glare of Manhattan, hailed a bright-yellow Checker taxicab, resembling a scarab, and were driven to 32 East Sixty-first, the apartment of the missing relative—Nathalie Nabokov, the ex-wife of Nabokov’s cousin Nicolas. Misreading the meter’s 9.0 for “o, oh God, ninety, ninety dollars,” Vera forlornly handed over the one hundred dollars that was all of their capital. The driver: “ ‘Lady, I haven’t got a hundred dollars. If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t be sitting here driving this cab.’…Of course the simplest way for him would have been to give us the ten dollars’ change and call it a day,” Nabokov would finish the story. His day of arrival struck a note of good humor and informality that colored his view of America ever after.
Tall, insouciant, with a certain kind of aristocrat’s instinctive democratic ways, and fluent in English since the nursery, Nabokov enjoyed advantages that the hundreds of other émigrés milling in the great customs shed that day did not; and the views he formed of his “second home” were reflections of them. Countess Alexandra Tolstaya, the novelist’s youngest daughter, who ran a relief agency for displaced persons in New York, told him categorically: “All Americans are completely uncultured, credulous fools.” (Presumably, this harsh judgment extended to the Tolstoy Foundation’s honorary chairman, ex-President Herbert Hoover.) To the contrary, Nabokov assured a friend who was about to follow him a year or two later: “This is a cultured and exceedingly diverse country. The only thing you must do is deal with genuine Americans and don’t get involved with the local Russian emigration.”
The first job that the Tolstoy Foundation found for Nabokov was another fine comedy. In Vermont, where he was staying with other Russian émigrés, he received a cable with the good news that a job in publishing was being held for him, but returning to New York he was told to report not to the editorial offices of the publisher, Scribner’s, but to its bookstore a floor below in the same Fifth Avenue building, and be sure to stand up straight when he did. “At Scribner’s he was received by a man named Wreden, whom he had known in Europe, and who was somewhat nonplussed to see who had been sent over, since the job opening was for a delivery boy on a bicycle.”*4 Moreover, he was supposed to wrap the books to be delivered to the post office, working from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for a weekly emolument of sixty-eight dollars. Nabokov politely declined the job, which would not have sufficed to support his family; also, he did not know how to wrap packages. If he had been handier and more desperate, he might have found himself tying parcels to be delivered to Scribner’s authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, whom he did not admire, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he did. But Nabokov, unlike his hapless creation Timofey Pnin, had well-placed Russian-born admirers in the academy, and soon had acquired influential American admirers in publishing, such as Allen Tate and Edmund Wilson, who recommended him to the New Yorker. He published his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941, and was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard University to study entomology and a lectureship at Wellesley College in the next term (both were continued until 1948). A Guggenheim fellowship and citizenship followed, and before the decade was out he was appointed professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where world fame found the author of Lolita in 1958.
For those to whom glittering prizes began to arrive more slowly, or not at all, a brush with menial labor was nothing to laugh about. In Illustrious Immigrants Laura Fermi tells the story of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, later a great eminence at the University of Chicago and “realist” critic of the Vietnam War, who applied to an agency in New York that placed refugee scholars and was told by the young woman interviewing him that his two published books and previous teaching appointments in Frankfurt, Geneva, and Madrid hardly made him stand out, and he would be better advised to look for a job as an elevator boy. Morgenthau’s wife, Irma, was told by a Jewish relief agency that at thirty-one she was too old to be a saleswoman. The couple persevered, and their efforts were rewarded with a night-school job at Brooklyn College that paid by the hour for him, and a sales job at Macy’s for her. Nevertheless their joint earnings were scant. One time, the bedbugs in their furnished room bit Irma so badly that her supervisor told her to stay away until her sores had healed. A shy man, Hans Morgenthau was grateful when his students decided to teach him English; but despairing of making a life in New York, they traveled to Kansas City, where an employment agency placed him at the University of Kansas. His Politics Among Nations, published in 1948 after he had moved to Chicago, made his reputation, and remained a standard text for a generation. Morgenthau returned to New York after retiring from the University of Chicago, spending valedictory years at the Graduate Center at City University of New York and then at the New School. It is doubtful he ever remembered his first attempts to make his way in New York with any amusement.
Although the immigrants or their sponsors were compelled to show that they would not be wards of the state, their material circumstances varied from rich and famous to obscure and threadbare. Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian symbolist poet and playwright, best known in America for his play The Blue Bird and his 1911 Nobel Prize, was reported to be both when he appeared in July 1940. The New York Times headlined “Maeterlinck, Impoverished Exile, Arrives with Wife from France”; but when the New Yorker caught up with him at his suite at the Plaza Hotel, it noted that the “impoverished couple” had come with “a tiny French motor car,” thirty-two pieces of luggage, two Pekingese dogs, and a pair of parakeets, which were confiscated at customs in Hoboken. “Perhaps it is for the best,” Maeterlinck sighed; “bluebirds are the symbol of happy times.” (The elderly poet spent most of his exile in Palm Beach, Florida.)
For all but a super-cosmopolitan few, there was a period of adjustment in which at the same time they attempted to remake their lives and acquire a new language, the newcomers learned to cope with such American peculiarities as doors that had knobs rather than proper handles and opened the “wrong” way (when you left a building rather than entered it), and windows that had to be pushed up or down rather than casements. According to Helmut Pfanner, “The loud noises from their neighbors’ apartments, the result of insufficient insulation in cheap New York housing projects, made the émigrés think that Americans liked to hear these sounds to compensate for their loneliness.” Some were disconcerted by the homely proximity of “laxatives, syringes, and toilet paper” to the lunch counter in the ubiquitous drugstores. There were the usual complaints about the lack or inconspicuousness of post offices and public toilets, the absence of “public clocks” such as adorned Europe’s piazzas, and of piazzas themselves, in the proper sense.
Americans’ well-advertised obsession with “regularity” was another surprise, as was the compulsory good humor. (“Not to grin is a sin” is the way Sartre epitomized the ethos of millions of cheery Americans in his novel Iron in the Soul, set in 1940 and published in 1949, after he had spent considerable time in the U.S.) There was not even a suitable public place to air such grievances and discoveries. The émigrés complained that the cafeterias, which were the cheapest places to eat, served neither wine nor beer. There were bars, but no bistros or brasseries and, worst deprivation of all, no coffeehouses in the European style, in which to read, talk, or play chess hours at a time, for the price of a coffee or glass of wine. In all of New York there was no Café New York.
Few of the exiles escaped a lapse in professional status and income, which many had to endure permanently. The tendency to compensate for present indignities by dwelling on past glories was almost irresistible, epitomized by the prolific writer and scholar Helmut Hirsch’s poetic fable about the two émigré dachshunds who happened to meet on Broadway. “Once when I was a St. Bernard…” one of them begins. The story became proverbial. In fact, a few St. Bernards stayed St. Bernards—in literature, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, notably; in music, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, most famously; in scholarship, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Kristeller, Ernst Kantorowicz, among many others; in the sciences, Einstein, above all.
Scientists, established scholars, and musicians typically negotiated the transition most easily. Experimental and theoretical physicists, Gestalt psychologists, Bauhaus architects, art historians, and professors of comparative literature attained honored places in the ivory tower, and some adaptable social scientists eventually found their way to Madison Avenue. In the thirties, foreign conductors were on the podiums of symphony orchestras from San Francisco (Pierre Monteux) to Minneapolis (Dimitri Mitropoulos) to New York (Artur Rodzinski, Bruno Walter). Arturo Toscanini, the conductor of his own NBC Symphony Orchestra, which broadcast from Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center, was an international culture hero.
Middle-aged or elderly doctors and lawyers, legally obliged to reestablish their credentials in a foreign language, were often stalled and frustrated. (New York State had automatically accepted foreign medical credentials until 1936, but this generous practice did not survive the Depression.) “What would American doctors do if they had to master Viennese grammar at the age of seventy?” Richard Berczeller asked in the poignantly titled Displaced Doctor (1943). Younger scholars forced to drop their studies to flee had to resort to menial work until they acquired a Ph.D. (the “union card”). American colleges and universities were far less overtly hierarchical than Europe’s but even more demanding about degrees. “Without the Union Card of a Ph.D., some of them became secretaries, furniture painters, physical education instructors, even helping to sell the huge Hearst art collection at Gimbels, taking any one of the few available jobs for funds to complete their degree or help establish a reputation through publication.” In the first years of the emigration it was not uncommon to find ex-professors hauling furniture, surgeons waiting tables in restaurants, litterateurs coaching tennis, and philosophers washing dishes. (At least, Ernst Bloch told Theodor Adorno he had been reduced to this extremity.)
Reflexively, we picture the exile as solitary, even while knowing that Dante fathered seven children by his wife, Gemma Donati; that Heine was nursed faithfully by Crescence Eugénie Mirat, the shopgirl he married in Paris; that Marx had his “Jenny” beside him in Soho; and Mme de Staël enjoyed the virile companionship of Benjamin Constant. Even so, the intellectual migration was “more than any other period in exile, a family matter,” with for the first time the female contingent outnumbering the male. With fewer restrictions on their foreign travel, wives often went ahead of their husbands—who might be liable for arrest or even put in a concentration camp—to New York or some other destination to do the paperwork for a visa and to raise the money for their husbands’ boat passage. Often as not, the wife was obliged to remain the family mainstay for some time after the former professor, banker, or accredited doctor arrived, some to be un- or underemployed for months or years. Usually with little fuss, women who had run households in Germany but rarely had professional careers of their own became housemaids, factory workers, babysitters, worked in the needle trade, sold encyclopedias or baked goods.
Finding a job and learning English were the joint perplexities that bedeviled the émigrés, whether it was a writer determined to find a new audience in a new language, a singer or actor, or, perhaps most poignantly, a lawyer or doctor required to reestablish his credentials by examination. French or Italian, not English, was the second language in which an educated German of the émigré generation was likely to have any fluency; the struggle to master English in middle age was bound to be an arduous and incomplete project, although the émigré wives almost uniformly learned faster, and spoke more idiomatically, than their husbands. Grammars and night schools, magazines and newspapers instructed the newcomers in English, and the movies, the radio, and the streets imparted it by immersion. The novelist Claudia Martell “prayerfully” practiced such difficult English sounds as “the,” which she called “the enemy of all immigrants”; Jimmy Stern, a professor of theater history at Columbia later, confessed: “I could live here two hundred years (God forbid), and I’d still not learn its language.”
When it was a matter of what someone called “a race between the language and the bank account,” however, it was natural to pretend to rapid progress. As Hannah Arendt sardonically wrote in the Menorah Journal (1943), “With the language, however, we find no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two hours they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language—their German is a language they hardly remember.” There were those like Oskar Maria Graf, the Bavarian novelist, who refused on principle to learn English; and almost all of the most notable German émigrés, including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Stefan Zweig contributed to the Aufbau (“construction” in German), subtitled “America’s Only German-Jewish Publication,” founded by the German-Jewish Club in New York in 1934 and published until 2004, which reached a circulation of a hundred thousand during the war. But the one language could prosper only as the other one waned—Arendt’s “optimists” were right about that—and in time even the writers who remained loyal to German found it more and more difficult to keep up their mastery in an English-speaking environment; not even a Broch or a Mann was immune to this coarsening effect.
The academy, within limits, was the big American institution most hospitable to the émigrés, and the New School of Social Research in Greenwich Village led the way by establishing the University in Exile for refugee scholars in 1933. From its founding in 1919 by John Dewey and the historians Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson—they had all quit Columbia University in protest of Nicholas Murray Butler’s imposition of a loyalty oath during the First World War and accompanying limits on faculty free speech—the New School was intended to be an arena for freethinking. Thorstein Veblen joined the faculty early on. Alvin Johnson, an economist originally from the Great Plains, took over as director in 1921; reoriented the fledgling college as a night school with open enrollment; enlarged the curriculum to include arts, letters, and psychology; and in place of permanent faculty recruited visiting lecturers such as Lewis Mumford, the composer Henry Cowell, and the painter Thomas Hart Benton. Into this lively and experimental downtown milieu were welcomed a select group of refugee scholars in the first year of Hitler’s rule, with funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and Hiram Halle, a wealthy businessman and inventor specializing in improvements to the typewriter. A shy tycoon who was a partner in Gulf Oil, Halle ran a sort of private Jewish-emigrant relief agency in the thirties and forties, employing refugees to restore the dozens of historic houses he owned in Pound Ridge in New York’s Westchester County.
The Rockefeller Foundation was the financial mainstay of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign (originally “German”) Scholars, which had been formed to find temporary or permanent jobs in American colleges and universities for the refugees. In practice those placed were limited to “mature scholars of distinction who had already made their reputations,” since younger ones would be competing with their American contemporaries in the Depression, and older ones would be expensive to pension (fifty-eight was adopted as the shadow line). On behalf of the committee, the Rockefeller Foundation proposed that it transfer as many as one hundred refugee scholars to America, to teach at the University in Exile within the New School. A solid job offer satisfied the stringent immigration standards of the isolationist thirties, and, once authorized to grant advanced degrees by the state of New York, the exile academy was solemnized as the graduate faculty of the New School in 1935.
“The New School practically determined the receptivity of the intellectual world of America to the scholars from abroad,” its then-dean Clara W. Meyer said later, although for most of the refugees it was a way station to better-paying and more secure employment elsewhere, usually outside New York City. Between 1933 and 1940, the diverse talents recruited to the New School included the theologian Paul Tillich, a cadre of experimental psychologists led by Max Wertheimer, and two scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute, the sinologist Karl Wittfogel and the sociologist Leo Lowenthal.
The philanthropy of New York’s German-Jewish financial and mercantile elite—familiarly, “Our Crowd”—helped make New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) an unparalleled haven for refugee art historians. Thanks to such benefactors as Colonel Michael Friedsam, the heir to the B. Altman department store fortune, art history at NYU was already being taught by “an unusually cosmopolitan, European-oriented faculty” by 1931, when it was still a division of the College of Fine Arts. Friedsam gave his backing to the design of two NYU administrators, General Charles H. Sherrill and Walter W. S. Cook, to create an independent graduate program in art history, with research professors spending half the year abroad and teaching courses at the Ecole du Louvre and in Berlin and Munich. The Nuremberg Decrees mooted this transatlantic dream, but the IFA was launched on its ambitious way.
Erwin Panofsky was invited to join the budding Institute of Fine Arts as a visiting professor in 1931, when it numbered just a dozen or so students and three or four professors. “Both lecture and seminar courses were held in the basement rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, commonly referred to as ‘the funeral parlors,’ where smoking was forbidden under penalty of death and stern-faced attendants would turn us out at 8:55 p.m., regardless of how far the report or discussion had proceeded,” Panofsky wrote in a 1953 memoir, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European.” “The only thing to do was to adjourn to a nice speakeasy on Fifty-second Street.”
It was the waning days of Prohibition, and Panofsky, writing in the third person, “tells how he found himself surrounded by an atmosphere of cozy dissipation which is hard to describe and harder to remember without a certain nostalgia—the European art historian was at once bewildered, electrified, and elated. He feasted on the treasures assembled in museums, libraries, private collections, and dealers’ galleries…He was amazed that he could order a book at the New York Public Library without being introduced by an embassy or vouched for by two responsible citizens; that libraries were open in the evening, some as late as midnight; and that they actually seemed eager to make material accessible to him.” Even the Museum of Modern Art, in its old quarters, “permitted visitors to leave unsnubbed in those days.” Americans seemed genuinely to like going to lectures—something he supposed an anthropologist could explain—and lectures on art history were “delivered not just in the seats of learning but also in the homes of the wealthy,” with the audience arriving “in twelve-cylinder Cadillacs, seasoned Rolls-Royces, Pierce-Arrows, and Locomobiles.”
Panofsky had the advantage of being established in America before being cast out of his profession at home, when Jews were fired from German universities in 1933. “I fondly remember the receipt of a long cable in German, informing me of my dismissal but sealed with a strip of green paper which bore the inscription ‘Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.’ ” The IFA’s genial director was Walter William Spenser Cook, a WASP gentleman scholar (Harvard, 1913; Ph.D. 1924), to whom Panofsky pays fond tribute in his memoir. Cook had had a genius for strategic self-deprecation: “ ‘Hitler is my best friend,’ he used to say, ‘he shakes the trees and I collect the apples.’ ” No doubt, as Colin Eiser suggests, it was just because this generous and well-connected establishmentarian “was personally nothing like his protégés, that he could persuade so many deans to find a place for them in their faculties, and raise the money necessary to hire those he wanted for the Institute. ‘I just passed the hat around,’ ” he would say, explaining how he hired other distinguished visiting professors. The IFA graduated from the Metropolitan’s stygian depths to an apartment in an old brownstone, where the “magic lantern” slides were projected in a darkened living room and the syllabuses were stacked in the bathtub, next moving to the six floors of Paul Warburg’s old mansion.
The Institute of Fine Arts could only have flourished in New York City, where the adjacency of great museums and collections obviated the need for one of its own. “You may spend your money on a museum,” Cook told the administrator of another fine arts department, “but we are going to move right next to a museum and let it buy our works of art, while we spend it on the professors and get the best there are.” Under his entrepreneurial wing the “native Americans” on the faculty, himself and Richard Offner, were joined by the refugee eminences such as the classical archaeologist Karl Lehmann, from Münster, and the baroque specialist Walter Friedlaender, from Freiburg.
Panofsky was offered an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1934, where he moved full-time in 1935; there he produced his celebrated Studies in Iconology (1939), The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943), and the essay collection Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955). At the IAS, he wrote, “its members do their research openly and their teaching surreptitiously, whereas the opposite is true of so many other institutions of learning.”
Though written under the shadow of McCarthyism, Panofsky’s memoir-survey is cheerful, often very funny; in a few pages it condenses the rise of art history in America from the hobby of rich, cultivated men like Henry Adams and Charles Eliot Norton in the late nineteenth century into a full-fledged academic specialization capable of challenging Germany’s preeminence after the First World War. It was not only the material resources available to universities such as Princeton and Harvard that made the decade from 1923 to 1933 a golden age for building and enlarging museums and collections, for opening up and enriching a new field of scholarship, and for excavations; it was the unprecedented vantage point that America’s empire city offered to postwar Europe’s present and past. Panofsky wrote:
Where the communications between the European countries, too close for speedy reconciliation and too poor for a speedy resumption of cultural exchange, remained disrupted for many years, the communications between Europe and the United States had been kept intact or were quickly restored. New York was a gigantic radio set capable of receiving and transmitting to a great number of stations which were unable to reach each other [emphasis added]. But what made the greatest impression on the stranger when first becoming aware of what was happening was this: where the European art historians were conditioned to think in terms of national and regional boundaries, no such limitations existed for the Americans…Historical distance (we normally require from sixty to eighty years) proved to be replaceable by cultural and geographical distance.
And what was true for art history applied, mutatis mutandis, to art, architecture, political science, psychology. New York was not only the transmitter of its own “cultural instrumentalities in a thousand phases,” as the WPA writers said, but also where all the signals were picked up, amplified, and redirected.
*1 Born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Appel (1907–77) boasted the usual résumé of odd jobs, including farmer, bank clerk, factory hand, and lumberjack, found on dust jackets in the days before the advent of the creative writers’ workshop. Like the better-known proletarian writer Arthur Hayes, he began by writing poetry. His novel Fortress in the Rice (1951), based on his wartime service in the Philippines as a civilian advisor, was adapted for the movies in 1963 as Cry of Battle, starring Rita Moreno, Van Heflin, and James MacArthur.
*2 History and dictionary usage distinguishes between “émigrés,” who depart voluntarily from their homelands for whatever political or personal (aesthetic, social) motives; “exiles” cast out by the state, from Ovid to Heine and Marx and Joseph Brodsky; and “refugees,” who flee out of compulsion and terror. In twentieth-century circumstances, the categories bleed into one another. Thomas Mann, for example, was an émigré who became an exile, like many others less distinguished.
*3 Yet what a long shadow it would cast across the intellectual landscape of the century. As Jeffrey Mehlman writes: “Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism, in the person of Maurice Maeterlinck, came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism, in the person of André Breton, came to survive; and where French structuralism, in the person of Claude Lévi-Strauss, came to be born. As such, in those brief years the city was curiously traversed by three of the four cultural vanguards bequeathed to the world over the last century.” The fourth, French existentialism, then made its appearance in the waning days of the war “in the person of Jean-Paul Sartre.” Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000), 1.
*4 His fellow émigré Nicholas R. Wreden (1901–54), the son of the former private physician to the tsar and his family, had fought as a royal cadet during the First World War, and against the Bolsheviks during the revolution and civil war, experiences he described in a memoir, The Unmaking of a Russian (1935); he arrived in New York in 1920. After pursuing various other occupations, he drifted into publishing, first as a traveling salesman, and was manager of Scribner’s bookstore when Nabokov was presented to him as a prospective delivery boy in 1940. Moving to E. P. Dutton as editorial director later in the forties, he published Gore Vidal’s early novels, most notably The City and the Pillar; it seems not to have occurred to him to publish Nabokov, although his Park Avenue apartment was a popular gathering place for anti-Soviet émigrés.