Weimar in America

REFUGEE SCHOLARS IN
AMERICA: THEIR IMPACT
AND THEIR EXPERIENCES
Lewis A. Coser
Yale University Press. $25.1984

Few events in this century have altered the landscape of American intellectual life so much as the massive immigration during the 1930s of German speaking refugee intellectuals. In a strictly demographic sense, of curse, the arrival of a few thousand exiles seems a tiny trickle when measured against the immense waves of European immigration that washed over the United States in the decades before the immigration-restriction statues of the 1920s. But what this particular group lacked in size it made up in potency, for the infusion of a few powerful minds can change the chemistry of culture. To be sure, American civilization has always been deeply indebted to exiles and immigrants for their intellectual contributions. Such influences, however, have generally manifested themselves in piecemeal fashion. To find a concentrated transfer of advanced learning comparable to that effected by the Hitler-era refugee scholars, one would have to search back through three hundred years of American history, to the great migration of English Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

One need only consider the Puritans' intellectual legacy, its effects still very much in evidence today, to realize how consequential such a transfer can be. Of course, too close a comparison of these two intellectual migrations would be misleading, not to mention anachronistic, for the motives involved were entirely different. John Winthrop and his band of Old Testament-minded zealots conceived themselves to be embarked upon a divinely ordained mission, a European errand into the American wilderness. The German refugee intellectuals, however, most of them secular Jews and many with radical-leftist political sympathies, had a more mundane mission: sheer survival. Where the Puritans had responded to the pull of a new beginning, an Edenic regeneration, the German intellectuals felt only the diabolical push of Nazi terror, and many came to archapitalist America with the profoundest reluctance.

Even as reluctant emigrants, however, they were to have a telling effect, for their sensibilities had been shaped by an extraordinarily sophisticated intellectual culture, in a country whose high literacy rate and advanced educational institutions were the world's envy. They therefore brought to the United States a dauntingly high standard for intellectual endeavor, and made impressive contributions to nearly every field imaginable. Among them were the political and social thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Karl Wittfogel, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Erich Fromm the psychologists and psychoanalysts Kurt Lewin, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Willhelm Reich, Heinz Hartmann, and Karen Horney; the theologian Paul Tillich; the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius; the artists Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers; the musicians Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill; the filmmakers Otto Preminder, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder; and an astonishing number of gifted scientists, of whom the physicists Albert Einsteinm, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller are merely the best known. Even this brief list barely begins to suggest how impressive was the array of imported intellect, for it necessarily omits the many distinguished scholars who happen to be little known outside their disciplines; not can it take notice of the considerable number of gifted individuals who were, for a variety of reasons, unable to carve our a suitable niche for themselves in American intellectual life.

From the standpoint of the life of the mind, then, the German tragedy would appear to have resulted in a great and unambiguous windfall for the cultural life of the United States. And that is generally the light in which it has been regarded. As Walter W. S. Cook of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, who recruited such notable refugee scholars as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, and Karl Lehmann, liked to quip, "Hitler is my best friend, he shakes the tree and I collect the apples." This widely shared sentiment was to be further reinforced by a posthumous romanticization of Weimar culture, which gathered momentum precisely as the 1920s themselves became transformed into misty memory, a poignant calm before the barbarous storm. But one need not accept Karl Mannheim's extravagant comparison of Weimar Germany to Periclean Athens to concede that the Republic witnessed a remarkable burst of vitality in nearly every field of intellectual or artistic endeavor. It represented perhaps the most lively and concentrated expression of modernism seen in this century, and by providing a heaven for many of the refugee intellectuals, the United States fell heir to a sizable portion of he Republic's cultural legacy.

History, however, is far too cunning to award her bounties without also exacting a heavy price for them. An iron Newtonian law governs such matters: Every historical benefit entails an equal and opposite cost. That Weimar culture obeyed this law is recognized even by its most admiring historians; as Peter Gay has observed, the excitement of Weimar was in large measure the product of "anxiety, fear, [and] a rising sense of doom" (not exactly the sentiments one discovers in Pericles' funeral oration). Such a melancholy law of compensation has never found its way into an assessment of Weimar's subsequent life in the United States, but common sense surely dictates that it ought to have. We all know that unearned wealth can be as much a curse as a blessing for its recipients, for it sometimes denies them the more solid satisfactions that come only with hard-won achievements and engenders crippling doubts about the adequacy of their yet-untested abilities. Did the intellectual migration bring a similar sort of misfortune, along with its unquestionable benefits, to American culture? By allowing us to gather up other nations' apples rather than to cultivate our own, did it reinforce the passive, derivative, and "archival" mentality that critics from Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Steiner have found to be a telling defect in our national culture?

To answer these questions, one would need a dispassionate appraisal of the intellectual migration from an explicitly American vantage point. But such a book has not yet been written. Nor is the primary reason difficult to find. Nearly every serious treatment of the subject has been written by refugees themselves, or by their friends, relations, or students--in other words, by the very people least able or likely to provide a disinterested assessment. From H. Stuart Hughes' Sea Change to Anthony Heilbut's Exiled in Paradise, the major chronicles of this event have reflected the perspectives of the subjects themselves, and thus inevitably reflect their subjective understanding of their American experience and influence. When so well-regarded an American scholar as Hughes celebrated this second great migration as a "deprovincialization" of the American voice to a sentiment harbored in many an emigrant heart.

For a number of years, it was plausible to claim that the migration. By the end of the 1970s, however this episode in American intellectual history was drawing to a close, for nearly all of the most prominent German educated refugee intellectuals had passed from the scene. And with the passage of time, a more detached and historical perspective on these events has become increasingly possible. Tom Wolfe's infamous From Bauchaus to Our House (1981), which explored the way that the transplanted the way that the transplanted architectural thought of Weimar Germany came to dominate American architectural practice in the post-World War II era, may have been written in a combative spirit of epater les artistes but is also served a worthy end by pointed the way toward a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Weimar's American career.

Of course, Wolfe's primary aim was to poke fun at what he regarded as the fraudulent pretensions of the contemporary American architectural establishment. But his book also served to illuminate the Bauhaus aesthetic by reminding us of the historical context in which it originated. The early proponents of an international style strove mightily to efface the merely national or provincial in architectural expression and to replace it with transnational absolute form. But Wolfe was properly skeptical of their claims. Gropius and Mies, after all, has not sprung fully armed from the brow of Zeus; rather, their modernism, like any other aesthetic, was the product of a particular time and place. Their eager embrace of internationalism probably owed more to an understandable revulsion against recrudescent German racialism and the nationalistic carnage of World War I than to the far hazier attraction of positive ideals. The desire to create "worker housing" that eschewed any ornamentation or embellishment suggestive of "bourgeois mystification" reflected the times' subordination of aesthetics to a pervasive romantic Marxism--as second nature among Weimar-era intellectuals as era-of-limits environmentalism was among American college students in the 1970s. The reiterated injunction to "start from zero" in one's aesthetic thinking was more than an esoteric manifesto; it made profound emotional sense in the political and economic chaos of humiliated interwar Germany, whose fatally compromised liberal-democratic regime was detested by its radical enemies and damned with faint praise by its moderate friends.

But is would not make nearly so much sense in a triumphant post-World War II America, as the newly preeminent world power confidently approached the zenith of her influence and prosperity. Nevertheless, at the high-water mark of the American century, an aesthetic sensibility born in a humiliated German nation spinning toward further calamity was to burst forth and take the victorious Americans by storm. Hence the droll irony Wolfe discerned in the spectacle of the great corporate capitalists conducting their business in the Bauhaus-inspired steel-and-glass "worker housing" that began to spring up all over the urban American landscape.

It would be a mistake, however, to read any precise significance into this paradox, for nothing is more characteristically American than an eclecticism that plucks the blossoming flower while tossing away the historical stem and roots. Where else could Brecht and Weill's gruesome "Mack the Knife" have been transformed into Bobby Darin's finger-snapping, toe-tapping popular hit song? Of all nations, America cares least where something or someone comes from. Clean breaks with the past were nothing new in America; they were comfortably established as social and intellectual tradition. It was rather Van Wyck Brooks' plea for a "usable past," a cultural expression of the Progressive Era's conservationist strain, that seemed to go against the American grain. If in Germany "starting from zero" sounded provocative or risqué, in America it was a hoary truism, the Emersonian faith of our fathers. In this respect, German and American premises dovetailed with wonderful neatness.

But what Wolfe found particularly lamentable about the Bauhaus blitzkrieg was the way it effectively drove the achievements of Americans, notably Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, out of the minds of aspiring architects in search of heroes to emulate. The ascendancy of Weimarian modernism would have a similar effect in many of the other arts. Schoenberg's serialism, which systematically abolished tonal hierarchy by the rigorously enforced "democratization" of musical tones, quickly came to dominate the thinking of young composers and critics, superseding the work of such inventive American-culture enthusiasts as Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. Moreover, it was the dazzling theorizing of émigrés like Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, not the palpable example of American painters like Eakins, Sloan, and Hopper, that excited the imagination of the most talented young artists. Hence, at just the; moment that America was coming of geopolitical age, American art was disengaging itself from the American scene. The usable past had quickly become passé.

This intellectual shift was accompanied by a dramatic change in the social organization of art. The "compound mentality" that Wolfe saw controlling the education of young architects at the most prestigious institutions was in fact an emerging professional mentality, one that came to have its equivalents in each of the arts--even, alas, "creative" writing. These institutionalized, bureaucratic guilds increasingly controlled entrée to their fields and largely dictated the climate of critical opinion. Small wonder that free spirits like Wright, Brooks, H.L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, and George Gershawin-men who were not coincidentally, busy creating a vernacular American culture worthy of the name--have become a nearly extinct species. Although the refugee artists did not create this movement toward institutionalization, they were especially quick to recognize and exploit it. When Gropius became the head of the Harward architecture school, he also became a curator of the American architectural future.

The arts were not the only fields whose makeup the Central European refugees would help transform. In psychoanalysis, for example, Heinz Hartnmann and his colleagues enjoyed astonishing upon the American psychoanalytic establishment, a fundamentalist brand of Freudianism, delivered straight from the right hand of the Father. Thus the perdurable stereotype of the American psychoanalyst as arigid dogmatist with a heavy Austro-German accent has considerable basis in fact. The legacy of this success, however, has been les than fortunate. As even so great an admirer as H. Stuart Hughes will admit, much of the present malaise in the psychoanalytic profession "directly derives from the triumph of the Central Europeans." Because Hartmann and company has "refused to discard any of the intellectual baggage" they had brought across the ocean, Hughes has charged, the contributed to an "ever wider gap" between orthodox theory and clinical reality. T their institutional triumph would translate into an intellectual setback for their discipline.

In the fields of political and social thought, too, the refugees achieved notable successes. Almost overnight, social research became an émigré speciality, conducted through such outposts as the New School for Social Research, the Bureau of Applied Social Research, and the Institute of Social Research. Such writers as Adorno, Lowenthal, and Lawarsfeld were especially interested in deep readings of American popular culture--soap operas, Jazz, magazine articles about celebrities, recordings, radio broadcasts, "light" classical music, and the like--using a combination of diluted Marxism and psychoanalytic theory to reveal the "latent" meaning of these cultural artifacts. And, working in a rather different vein, such political thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss concentrated their attention on the philosophical origins of modernity and the recovery of the buried ancient roots of Western political thought.

Even this brief description suggests how profoundly their political and social vision was haunted by the ghost of Weimar. Indeed, the very word Weimar called forth a procession of tragic associations, for it stood for the intellectual heritage of Geoethem, that exemplar of the German liberal Zivilisation that had repeatedly been demonstrated to be the most fragile of reeds. He new Republic was named foe Goethe's city partly in the hope that it would become a political incarnation of his spirit. Thus, the entire chronology of events culminating in the Nazi seizure of power would be burned into the exiles' memories with an aching permanence, a permanence fixed by the uprooting they had suffered and by their retrospective knowledge of the horrors that the Republic's failure would unleash. When they turned their attention to the study of American politics and society, they could not help reading American conditions through the distorting filter of German experience. As Hannah Arendt's friend and admirer Randall Jarrell well understood, "You escaped from nothing" he westering soul/Finds Europe waiting for it over every sea."

In fact, the filtering process had begun even before they arrived. When Lotte Lenya was asked about her first impressions of America, she replied, "But we had no first impressions, for we had all seen the movies of Von Sternberg and Von Stroheim." Also influential were the arch-capitalist dystopias rendered in Kafka's Amerika and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, along with the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair (best -sellers in German translation), all of which helped give powerful shape to a gargoyle vision of monstrosity--"a mistake" and "an anti-paradise," Freud had groaned in famous dismay. America became synonymous with modernity, even in the most ethereal reaches of the culture; when Martin Heidegger deplored the modern era's worship of technology, science, and consumerism, he designated those errors simply as "Americanism," to him, such failings represented not merely some petty cultural peccadilloes, but betokened a state of ontological "fallenness," an alienation from Being itself.

It was no fresh green breast of the new world, then that the exiles glimpsed upon arrival, but an environment that their preconceptions had made to seem eerily familiar. But another factor far more responsible, for conditioning the émigrés view of American institutions was German history. The American tradition of representative democracy had proved sturdy enough to endure considerable travails and transfers of power for a century and a half. But in Germany democracy had shown only the most shaky prospects. The history of German liberalism was a depressing record of impotence and failure; it was never sufficiently established to resist the endemic polarization of German politics between factions of the extreme Left and Right, or to discourage the tendency of the sensitive "unpolitical man" to withdraw from public life, into the purer realm of culture.

The staggeringly rapid rate of German industrialization in the nineteenth century made intense social disruption virtually inevitable. A huge and discontented working class was born in but a few decades, drawn from a German population that had begun the nineteenth century in a decentralized culture of farms and small towns, a world legendary for its hidebound insularity. This wrenching social upheaval gave rise to the virulent anticaptialism and anti-modernism--and the anti-Semitism in which both would converge--that have been such fixtures in modern German political and social movements. Both comported well with a long-standing romantic disdain for mere "politics"--by which was meant the unseemly bargaining and compromising ways of Anglo-American democracy--in preference for an "organic" mode of organization that would restore the lost communal solidarity of Gemeinschaft. Weimar Germany was consumed with a "hunger for wholeness," in Peer Gay's words, a hunger that accounts for the desperate attraction of radical ideas--whether the example of the Soviet Union's "new society," or the prospect of a purified Teutonic Kultur. The relatively pallid and unspiritual appeal of Western-style parliamentary democracy was insufficient to gratify these deeper needs.

In short, radical ideas fit the feverish, unsettled atmosphere of Weimar Germany; but, once again, they were quite another matter in the postwar United States, where very different political and social conditions obtained. Nevertheless, the observations and prescriptions of many of the refugees would, not surprisingly, harken back to the calamitous events that had forced them into exile. "Refugees," mused Ignazio Silone, "spend most of their time telling one another the stories of their lives." Some of them, without always knowing it, would conceal their tales beneath the generalizing garment of philosophy.

The work of Hannah Arendt, who has influenced American conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike, is an instructive case in point. As a young student of philosophy in Marburg and Heidelberg during the 1920s, Arendt was disdainful of politics and uninterested in political philosophy; instead, she was captivated by the romantic aestheticism of her mentor, and lover, Martin Heidegger. When the time came for her to write her doctoral dissertation, she chose a subject far removed from her later concerns: Soviet. Augustine's philosophy of love. It was not until events thrust politics upon her that she began to reflect upon the issues that would form the core of her life's work. Thus she was something of a late convert to the importance of political thought, and her subsequent work, although exhibiting a convert's boundless zeal, would also bear the ineradicable mark of one trained as an "unpolitical" philosopher, deeply embedded in the ways of German idealism.

Goaded into political thinking by the horrors of Nazism, she would attempt to reason backwards from the false to the true-from the premises of totalitarianism, which she had attempted to articulate in her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), to what she presumed would be a sounder philosophical foundation for political life. Like Heidegger, she sought the poisonous essence of "modernity" and found its antidote in the remote reaches of ancient Greek thought and language. The condition, in a word, the Hannah Arendt had experienced--became her prototype for the "superfluous" condition facing all mankind in the modern era. She had transformed her personal experience into a parable for the age, and so her vision of the "new science of politics" would pit itself directly against the sources of that experience.

Hannah Arendt's view of American society followed naturally from her assumptions. Like many of the refugees, she never lost a certain Weimarian nervousness about the possibility of an American fascism; during the Watergate crisis, for example, Arendt anxiously informed her friends that she was seriously thinking of "emigrating back to Europe fast, while there was still time." But the America of the distant past genuinely excited her admiration--the vanished eighteenth-century world of preindustrial republicanism, whose "lost treasure" had been buried, she believed, beneath successive waves of industrialization and immigration. She had a passionate commitment to the idea of "action" in the political arena and to decentralized participatory democracy, as embodied in her vision of the Aristotelian polis. But, as with many of her other intellectual enthusiasms she cherished "action" as an idea, an object of contemplation--not as real activity in the real world. When she was asked, at a conference given in her honor, to give specific examples of "action" as she conceived it, she was unable to provide any. Never was the essentially romantic quality of her political thought more evident. "Action" was merely an appealing abstraction, deducted by an aprioristic chain of reasoning; but its application in twentieth-century circumstances was far from clear. "She never quite grasped," a sympathetic William Barrett gently observed, 'the realities of American politics."

Herbert Marcuse's view of America was less indulgent. Sounding as much like a thundering Junker as a radical, he elaborated a Marxian version of the German illiberal tradition, epitomized by his celebrated contention that the seeming freedom of the West was illusory, a "repressive tolerance." Mass culture--a term the émigrés helped popularize in America--was not to be regarded as healthy evidence of the democratization of culture; it was an opiate designed to replace religion in the masses' ever-befuddled brains, a totalitarian instrument of ruling-class domination. Appalled by Hitler's manipulation of mass communications for propagandistic purposes, the refugees who studied mass culture (or, to use the Wiemarian word, Kitsch) found sinister possibilities in even he most innocuous productions. Marcuse's Frankfurt colleagues Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm would suggest the Nazi comparison in another way. America shared Germany's potential for fascism because the "authoritarian personality" was an inevitable by-product of the bourgeois family, al pathology intrinsic to the capitalist order. And, according to Adorno's tendentious profile, an authoritarian personality was, among other things, a right-winger who disliked modernism in the arts. He was thus able to discredit all his enemies with a single conceptual stroke.

These ideas show clear signs of their Weimarian origins. But the Frankfurt style of social-psychological ad hominem argumentation was also immensely appealing to an influential group of liberal American intellectuals who believed ideological disputation was outmoded in the postwar era and could produce nothing but Weimarian divisiveness, a threat to American stability and liberal consensus. They were thus inclined to discredit their opponents rather than dignify their arguments by rebuttal. When Richard Hofstadter pointed to the persistence of a "paranoid style" in American political culture, and when he ridiculed the Republican Right as" pseudoconservatives" whose claims to uphold traditions were actually a smoke screen for their own fearful projectivity, he used nonmenclature that he had lifted straight out of Adorno. When Daniel bell and the five other contributors to The New American Right (1955) looked at the composition of right-wing and populist movements, they looked for the same basic social structure that had characterized the successful Nazi movement. The ghost of Weimar now stalked American politics and society, and it would continue to haunt our understanding of the political Right, and of populist reformers from William Jennings Bryan to Huey Long, for many years to come. Indeed, by the time the tumultuous 1960s arrived, and radicals of the New Left had begun to deploy the teachings of Marcuse against the authority of their liberal teachers, the America-as-Weimar analogy began to look like self-fulfilling prophecy.

That the intellectual legacy of Weimar in America, then, has been something less than an unmixed blessing seems beyond question. And that the time is ripe for reassessment is equally evident. It is therefore disappointing hat the most recent general treatment of the subject, the sociologist Lewis Coser's book Refugee Scholars in America, passes up a golden opportunity to advance and deepen our understanding of the subject. The book, a collection of brief biographical sketches of the most prominent scholars in the social sciences and humanities, will certainly be useful to future writers on the subject, if for no other reason than its inclusiveness and handiness. But anyone hoping to find a new perspective on the subject will find that Coser--who is himself a German refugee--has broken no new ground, in either his facts or his interpretation.

What is worse, the book presents so external and mechanical an account of the; movement and transfer of ideas that it makes the entire migration episode seem as dull as an academic conference--something one would never have thought possible. His is a form of intellectual history with the ideas themselves left out, which is rather like bathwater without the baby. Coser believes that intellectual history should concern itself primarily with "the interaction of human beings," concentrating on the "networks of influence and the interpersonal ties that came to link newcomers to those already settled in specific intellectual territories." As a result, some of his biographical sketches sound rather like their subject's curriculum vitae rendered in prose. In the case of Paul Oskar Kristeller, for example, we are told where he was born, where he was educated, where the taught, what the titles of his books, are, who his American friends are, and so on--but we get no feeling whatever for the texture of the man's mind. Because Coser has gravitated toward "objective," quantifiable measures of a scholar's eminence, we hear much about such matters as prestigious chairs held, number of references to said publications in tomes like the Social Science Citation Index, number of graduate students, professional awards received, and the like. All this is well and good, so far as it goes, but it is no substitute for the ideas themselves. Intellectual history ought to be more than professional shoptalk; it should dramatize how a thinker wrestles with reality, not merely how he commingles with his colleagues.

Oddly enough, Coser comes closest to accomplishing this in the sections on political and social thought--fields with which he has the greatest professional familiarity. His portraits of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arndt, Franz Neumann, Hans Morgenthau, the New School, and the Institute for Social Research contain a fair amount of intellectual substance. Unfortunately, though, he passes up opportunities left and right to break through to a more complex understanding of these thinkers and organizations. Sometimes he even misses the full significance of his own statements. In his sketch of Hannah Arendt, for example, he rightly observes that"[her] political thinking was largely shaped by her existential condition as an exile"--but he fails to consider whether her political judgment was also impaired by that same condition. On the next page, he notes that "Hannah Arendt, who never joined al political party, who rarely engaged in any political activities, nevertheless became one of the foremost exponents on the American scene of the idea of political freedom through involved participation in the arena of politics"--but he is not moved to wonder at this irony, or to ask whether she romanticized participatory politics precisely because she found herself temperamentally unable to participate.

But what one misses most in Refugee Scholars in America, as in every previous treatment of this subject, is a willingness on the part of the author to plant the book firmly in the soil of American history. In his preface, Coser asserts that his study "focuses not only on what the refugee intellectuals had to offer but also on the social and cultural conditions in the country of refugee." But the book in fact shows precious little interest in the latter conditions, and what little it does say remains closely bound up in the intramural doings of each particular academic discipline. If Coser is to persuade us that "the American mind was much stretched through its encounters with the refugee intellectuals," and if we are to be convinced that the refugees served to "deprovincialize the American mind and upgrade American culture," it will not do merely; to record the interminglings of specialists. He must finally say something about the American mind--what it had been, precisely how it was changed, and why that change was so salutary. This requires a fundamentally different perspective, one rooted not in the bitter-sweet glories of Weimar culture, not in evocations of the refugees' "existential condition," not in the structure of the specialized intellectual professions, but in American history.

Let me add that national perspective is not the same as a nationalistic one. I am not recommending that one uncritical celebration be exchanged for another, although the very fact that one feels obliged to provide such a disclaimer says something about the automatic resistance an explicitly American perspective can be expected to face. But the question of "upgrading American culture" appears to be a god deal more complicated than Coser and other writers on the subject have assumed. It may be, in fact, the ever-eclectic Americans, by so eagerly appropriating the distinguished productions of foreigners, have not so much upgraded their culture as they have left it to languish in a perpetual state of arrested development. Lionel Trilling was pointing to just this dilemma when he observed, some thirty years ago, that "the American intellectual never so fully expressed his provincialism as in the way he submitted to the influence of Europe." And the only plausible remedy was suggested by the invincibility European George Santayana: "The more different [America] can come to be, the; better; and we must let it take its own course, going a long way around, perhaps, before it can…learn to express itself simply, not apologetically, after its own heart." Excellent advice, but in the end, it seems always to go unheeded. For American culture has always had the good fortune--and the bad fortune--to be provided with a multitude of alluring shortcuts. And nowhere is this peculiarly American predicament more evident than in the ambiguous legacy of the illustrious German immigrants.