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Weimar in America
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11239 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
5,284 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
REFUGEE SCHOLARS IN AMERICA
Their Impact and Their Experiences
Lewis A. Coser
Yale University Press, 1984
$25
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
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