The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War by Udi Greenberg (review)

Abstract

[MWS 16.2 (2016) 254-283] ISSN 1470-8078 http://dx.doi.org/10.15543/MWS/2016/2/9© Max Weber Studies 2016, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. Book Reviews Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), ix + 276pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-0-691-15933-1. $35.00. There has been so much research and so many publications about German academic émigrés to the United States in the fields of law, politics, and the social sciences on both sides of the Atlantic over the last three decades that all relevant issues seem to have been covered already. So what should one expect from another book on this topic? Such initial skepticism is forgotten after just a few minutes of reading Udi Greenberg’s remarkable book. Greenberg makes clear that he aims at more than just retelling the story of a few German émigrés who came to the United States after 1933. He wants to convince the reader that the influence of some of these German émigrés on American politics from the late 1940s until the early 1960s—the era in which the United States became the number one world superpower —had been underestimated for far too long. The book breaks new ground in the research on the role of German émigrés in the United States. Much ink has been spelled about the tremendous influence of authors like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, or Herbert Marcuse in American academia. Other historians have already written about the role that politicians with a German émigré background, such as Henry Kissinger, played in the U.S. administration . But Greenberg intends to do far more. He wants to give evidence to support two theses which obviously inspired the ambitious title of the book, The Weimar Century: first, that the ideas, policies, and institutional connections of German émigrés travelled basically unchanged with them from Weimar Germany to the other side of the Atlantic; and second, that the ideas and activities of these five German émigr és, in particular, became crucial for both democratization and antiCommunist mobilization in the United States after World War II. The German émigrés whom Greenberg identifies as most influential , in this sense, were Karl Loewenstein (1891–1973), Ernst Fraenkel Book Reviews 255© Max Weber Studies 2016. (1898–1975), Carl Joachim Friedrich (1902–1984), Waldemar Gurian (1902–1954), and Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980), the youngest among them. All five made impressive careers in the United States, soon after escaping from Nazi Germany, as academics, writers, and—last but not least—consultants to various governmental administrations and philanthropic organizations. These five émigrés came from very different political, philosophical, religious, and intellectual backgrounds . Readers of Max Weber Studies may be interested to know that two of them—Loewenstein and Friedrich—were strongly influenced by Weber and his reception in Germany. Though some of the five émigrés loosely knew each other from their Weimar years, they never formed a group, even in exile. Each of them preferred to act on his own terrain. However, they did share one distinctive ideological mission: they wanted to save the United States from the disastrous fate of the short-lived Weimar Republic, as its collapse in 1933 had opened the path to the National Socialism and thus dictatorship, war, and the Holocaust. The book is organized into five main chapters. Each chapter is devoted to one of the German émigrés. There have already been biographies, books, and articles about every one of them, but Greenberg has nonetheless been able to dig up a great deal of material that had so far remained unnoticed, distributed in more than fifteen archives in Germany, the U.S., and England. It is surprising how many new facets about the German émigrés in America Greenberg has been able to contribute to our knowledge. This is the case, in particular , for the archival material he has found about Karl Loewenstein ’s deep involvement in the United States’ diplomatic and brutal military interventions in Latin America, already beginning in 1941 (187-98); about Ernst Fraenkel’s role as a key...