Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and “Central European Culture”

Abstract

“There was and there always will be something called the ‘Republic of Scholars,’” art historian Ernst Gombrich said recently. “We scientists or scholars, res publica litterarum, stick together and our home is our work. I do not feel myself an Englishman. I feel myself to be exactly what I am: a Central European who works in England.” Like other Central European emigres, Gombrich thought himself a member of a cosmopolitan scholarly community. But his self-identification as both a “Central European” (not an Austrian or Viennese) and a citizen of a timeless and contextless Republic of Letters seems strange. Neither interwar nor postwar Central Europe represented a unified entity, political or cultural, likely to draw the allegiance of an assimilated Jewish exile. Ethnonational tensions in the successor states to the Habsburg Empire, the Holocaust, the expulsions in the aftermath of World War II, and the Iron Curtain shattered whatever semblance of cultural unity Central Europe may have had. Gombrich recognized early on that Austria had no place for him. He emigrated to England in 1936 and tried desperately to convince family mem-