Transatlantic Connections: A Cosmopolitan Context for Max and Marianne Weber's New York Visit 1904

Abstract

Max Weber's Amerikabild, his 'picture' of the United States, was first shaped by the 1848 exile Friedrich Kapp (1824–1884), a leader of the German Republicans in New York, who after his return in 1870 became a close family friend and a paternal mentor. The first section sketches the relations between Friedrich Kapp and Max Weber senior, and also their sons, in the context of the global economic developments before the First World War. The second deals with the Webers' German-American and German-Jewish contacts in New York, the third with their meeting the Lichtensteins, Kapp daughters and sons-in-law. This served Max as a sounding board for evaluating the tensions between Yankee religious tradition, secularization and assimilation (section 4). Finally, I will turn to the fates of three generations of American and German Kapp descendants, a story of German-Jewish relations on both sides of the Atlantic. This completed a cycle of exile and emigration from the 1848ers to the refugees from Nazi Germany. If with decreasing intensity, relations with the Weber family continued into the 1930s.