The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s (Key Issues in Modern Sociology) - Hardcover

Kettler, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857287931 ISBN 13: 9780857287939

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Building on many years of inquiry into the sociology of intellectuals, notably through a series of books on the sociologist, Karl Mannheim, this book brings together the results of ten years of work on the special problems of intellectuals in exile. The historical materials all relate to the emigration from Nazi Germany, not only because this event has generated the richest literature in exile studies, but also because of the author’s personal connections to the situation and to a number of outstanding representatives of that exile. Case studies are devoted to the following figures: Johannes Becher, Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Gerth, Oskar Maria Graf, Kurt Hiller, Erich Kahler, Alfred Kantoriowics, Hermann Kesten, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, Hans Mayer, Franz Neumann, Nina Rubinstein, Oskar Seidlin and Carl Zuckmayer.

The book opens with a systematic proposal for the study of intellectual exile, entailing a critique of approaches that neglect concrete political dimensions in favor of a metaphorical cultural approach. In the distinctive approach elaborated through a series of problem-centered case studies, the focus is on the multiple, complex and changing negotiating processes and bargaining structures constitutive of exile, especially as the question of return interplays with the politics of memory.

The first three chapters deal with émigré intellectuals whose writings contain theoretically important reflections on exile and related conditions. The interplay and conflicts between the priorities of ambitious American university scholarship and the self-understanding of the exile cohort identified with the Humanities is the theme of the next detailed study. In the following long chapter, the focus is on the outcome of exile, documented by the first letters written by intellectual and literary exiles to individuals who had remained in Germany and with whom they had unfinished business. These diverse reopenings of negotiations are uniquely revealing about different ways of settling with the experiences of exclusion and the prospects of return.

The final section of the book reverts to its very beginnings in two senses: it offers a self-reflection by the author about his own relations to the exile under study as a member of the “second wave” generation that arrived from Germany as children, with special attention to the elective affinities between himself and members of the actual primary cohort.

In a series of focused studies related to the event that has generated the richest literature in exile studies – the intellectual exiles arising out of Nazi rule – this volume reconsiders a number of issues raised by that literature, notably the multiple, complex and changing negotiating processes and bargaining structures constitutive of exile, especially as the question of return interplays with the politics of memory.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Kettler was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1930, and moved to the USA in 1940 as a member of the “second wave” generation of refugees from Nazi Germany. His publications extend across the fields of political theory, law and society, sociology, cultural studies and intellectual history. He is Research Professor in Social Studies at Bard College in New York, as well as Professor Emeritus in Political Studies and Cultural Studies at Trent University in Ontario.

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The Liquidation of Exile

Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s

By David Kettler

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2011 David Kettler
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-793-9

Contents

Preface, vii, 
1. The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm, 1, 
2. Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein's Exile Studies, 25, 
3. A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile, 35, 
4. Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann, 43, 
5. The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State, 83, 
6. First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?, 109, 
7. The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise, 147, 
Notes, 171, 
Selected Bibliography, 199, 
Index, 205, 

CHAPTER 1

The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm

This is a book about exile. It is also a book about some figures within a cohort of individuals in a particular time and place to whom the term exile has been variously applied — persons active in one or another sphere of public space who were displaced by Nazi rule in Germany between 1933 and 1945 — and whose historical experiences and achievements have been found sufficiently important to serve as a point of departure for an interdisciplinary field of studies. While there can be no prohibition against simply postulating a plausible definition of exile as a preliminary to biographical, historical, or critical studies of the individuals or groups subsequently classed under that dramatic label, as is often done in exile studies, such a proceeding entails costs. Exile has a rich and contested history as a concept in political, literary, and religious reflection — a history that enters as well into the recognition of self and others among those involved in the instances under study. The aim of the present study is to take some chapters in the historical inquiry into the 1930s exile as the locus for an investigation of the phenomena and issues at stake in the contested uses of exile in social inquiry.

The Concept of Exile

What work does the term exile do in the contemporary language of cultural and political self-reflection, so that interpreters find it worthwhile to quarrel about its scope and application? Well, exiles in that context are always special. They are suspended between two places. In one place, they are denied, either by threat of violence or by some other insupportable condition; in the other place, they are only conditionally accepted: they find asylum, not a home. They are at a distance from both places. Moreover, in almost all uses of the term, even exiles who are literally banished retain the special status only so long as they continue to identify themselves — or to be identified — with this suspension between the two places, the refusal wholly to abandon the one or wholly to accept the other. The focus of their attention is on their unfinished business between them and the first place, not their limited business with the second. Exiles accordingly appear unlike ordinary people whose ordinary needs and ambitions regulate their lives. Exiles are not rarely a reproach to those who stay behind, even though exiles may also reproach themselves for their departures, whether willing or coerced. To be an exile is to have a project, to be a thoroughly untrivial person, however absurd your beliefs and conduct may appear to outsiders. To be an exile is to be interesting, in the way that a refugee or victim or traveler or immigrant cannot be supposed to be. Exile is a status that gives a right to a special kind of hospitality, a right to asylum, and that exempts the beneficiary from the ordinary rules of reciprocity. It is not a surprise, consequently, that the meaning of exile is a bone of contention among both social scientists and cultural commentators. It implies a lot about the person(s) to whom it is applied. The status makes claims and excuses, while it also implies separation from and uncertain loyalty to the place of residence and the company of others who are there. Exile, it might be said, is politics in extremis. It tests the capacities of political life when such life is deprived of most of its institutional supports.

Like many similar terms, exile is used both to refer to a condition and to persons or groups who are identified with that condition by contemporary observers, commentators, or themselves. There is controversy about both aspects. In the case of the condition, there are disputes not only about its distinction from states characterized by terms like cosmopolitan, wanderer, stranger, emigrant or refugee but also about its relationship to the language of political life, where the concept poses especially hard questions. In the case of the exemplars, the questions are about the applicability of the term over time: when and how does one become an exile, how does one sustain the condition, and when does one stop being an exile in any important sense?

Dictionary definitions are either too narrow — as when exiles are equated with those banished from their native lands — or they are too broad — as when all sorts of displacements from any state deemed native are included. Outright banishment is not altogether irrelevant to exiles in the era of the modern state, but it comprehends only a fraction of the cases where individuals see no acceptable alternative to departure from the scene on which they have been active. In a time in which identities are inwardly and outwardly contested, the concept of native land is also too restrictive to capture the bounded domains in which individuals operate and which they may be constrained to leave. When it comes to the question of return, moreover, no concept suffices that is not open to basic transformations in the place of departure. The many figurative and metaphorical conceptions of exile, on the other hand, are constantly at risk of rendering everyone an exile in some sense, and thus forfeiting the opportunity of specifying the complex that constitutes the condition of exile in the sense that has posed difficult questions in social, political, and ethical analysis.

The condition of exile takes multiple forms and requires in any case a study that attends to its susceptibility to conflict and change. In recent years, in fact, the trope of exile has stood high. To judge by some recent writings in literary criticism and cultural studies, exile appears as a transcendent status, beyond the ambiguous supports of historical circumstance, and beyond even the painful sense of its loss. Exile appears as an enabler of the most profound thought, art, and literature — an empowerment. And yet if we look in the newspapers for exiles, we find stories of pain, criminality, maneuver, burden, and racking contradictions. Exile here looks like something historically overdetermined, constricting, distorting, closely bound to the threat, suffering, and infliction of violence. A preliminary approach to the wider scope of the concept is provided by a survey of the current use of the term in the New York Times, considered here as I collected them for a month in the recent past.

There are eight items that involve exile. Two refer to leading figures in active external opposition to the clerical regime of Iran, with a noteworthy emphasis on the contrast between them and the opposition mobilized in the country against the outcome of the recent elections there. In the first instance, in an interview with the son of the last Shah, "the exile," as he is called...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0857287931
• ISBN 13: 9780857287939
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 211
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland