Weimars transatlantischer Mazen: Die Lincoln-Stiftung 1927 bis 1934. Ein Versuch demokratischer Elitenforderung in der Weimarer Republik

Abstract

One might think that the history of US involvement in the process of democratic reconstruction after the German defeat and devastation is by and large a well-researched field. While this might (or might, on closer inspection, not) be true for the Cold War period, it hardly holds for the years after Word War I. It seems as if the continuing interest of historians in what has been labelled ‘transnationalization’ and ‘expert network building’ persistently invites the question as to when and exactly how transatlantic entanglements came about and what role academia and intellectuals, in particular, had to play in the event. This is one of the most obvious reasons to applaud the book of Richardson, Reulecke and Trommler which combines three scholarly essays in its first half with an extensive edition of source material in the latter part. Richardson starts with a detailed analysis of a transatlantic philanthropic endeavour that will be new to researchers outside the more narrow field of the Rockefeller Foundation's activities in the twentieth century. He unfolds the founding history and development of the Abraham Lincoln Stiftung (ALS), which was formed in 1927 by a group of German liberal politicians and educators, the English man of letters, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876–1958), and some notable representatives of the American Rockefeller Foundation (RF; or, more exactly, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, which was incorporated into the RF in 1928). The three main initiators on the German side—Prussian educational reformer and distinguished orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker, the strong supporter of the League of Nations Hans Simons, and the director of both Germany's student aid society (Studentenwerk) and of the Student Foundation of the German People (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) Reinhold Schairer—all severly criticized prevailing mechanisms of class distinction and limited access to higher education in Germany. It was not so much specific academic disciplines that they were eager to support, but rather a more democratic corps of teachers, so they sided with a disproportionately large group of youth movement leaders (such as Hans Dehmel, who became one of the grantees), pacifists, adult education specialists and feminists (such as Alice Salomon) in the advisory board of the Stiftung. A clear majority of these roughly one hundred men and women were the driving forces behind a nationwide network of nominators, who, on behalf of the ALS, tried to identify and support unconventional minds marginalized by the German academic system or excluded because of a working class and popular school background. In that sense, the ALS's selection criteria were intentionally at odds with the established university system that still owed much to the spirit of Imperial Germany, favoured a more conservative climate and kept a sometimes hostile distance from the Republic. It is therefore not at all surprising that some of the Stiftung's directors and advisors later participated in the resistance to Hitler, while over a quarter emigrated after 1933, including the directors Simons and Schairer. The ALS was eventually closed down after the RF stopped funding in 1933/34, having hardly had enough time to develop to the full the liberalizing effect on Germany's intellectual culture that formed its programmatic centrepiece—indeed its ability to have precisely that impact was questionable from the outset.