The émigré

OUR COUNTRY, from the first a vast transcendental diaspora under the celestial protection of two oceans, in the thirties fell heir to, by way of unprecedented disasters, a radiance of genius. The émigrés were of such lofty achievement and possibility that the mere listing of the names is a sort of embarrassment because it seems to reduce the irreducible. Or it seems to try by order and condensation to contain the disorderly solitary eminence of the bearers of the names. émigrés, exiles, refugees from Germany and Austria, Hungary, Russia, Spain, Poland, Italy—and elsewhere, elsewhere. The density of the arts and sciences and the very luggage of civilization these persons carried with them surpass understanding. In the last fifty years they were among us in such multiplication it seemed as if they were some natural transcontinental cargo rather than an astonishment delivered by tragic history. The national psyche accommodated the savants, when it knew of them, with extraordinary and respectful generosity —and some amused and puzzled wonder. In any case, it was clear that there wasn’t enough laurel in the Rockies to adorn this large, polyglot pantheon of the uprooted and the overrun. Some arrived with their Nobel Prizes and more gained them while here. Some appear in encyclopedias as Americans: American theoretical physicist, b. Ulm, Germany. Albert Einstein.

In 1904, Henry James wrote of the “effect of the infusion,” the infusion being the swarm of foreign-born persons he found buzzing about and sometimes stinging his sensibilities when he returned to New York after a gap of twenty-one years. It appeared to him the Italians on the Lower East Side were not Italians at all. They seemed to have rid themselves, in a moment, as it were, of the peasantlike hierarchical courtesies, the attractive ancient colorations that made them so agreeable when they were tending the vines of Italy. They were not discourteous; they were simply a transplant transmogrified—a new, mysterious being. Wandering in the downtown ghetto, the New Jerusalem, he wondered, “Who can ever tell, moreover, in any conditions and in presence of any apparent anomaly, what the genius of Israel may, or may not, really be ‘up to’?”

To wonder what the later elite Jewish intelligentsia of Europe was “up to” could scarcely enter our minds in a colloquial phrase since it would require not a lovely, drifting social imagination of the kind James shows in The American Scene but, instead, immense imagination and information in the higher reaches of mathematics, physics, biology, art history, music, and on and on.

The émigrés from Nazism and fascism and also Russian communism were survivors of every sort and every condition. The Jews were united in their pain and grief, something not transferable to the American scene except perhaps to their fellow Jews of no matter how long a local citizenship. However, for the extraordinary talents simple assimilation into American culture for practical reasons was not a demand, since it was their fate to be exceptions without boundaries, even though they had suffered from the boundaries of their circumstance in a time of catastrophe.

Our institutions and a wide, if sometimes imperfect, hospitality asked of these gifted émigrés only that they continue to be themselves or continue to complete the self achieved with such spectacular promise in the past. This was a benign and unusual condition, something the earlier groups fleeing from pogroms or gross poverty could not have understood. The unusual welcoming was in many cases chilled by difficulties in language and by what might be called “medium” or obscure previous celebrity. And so there were learned art historians, critics, essayists, political theorists, wandering about New York with the merely respectable anonymity of some NYU doctorate.

Nabokov spoke of his European Humbert Humbert, that outrageous disturbance in Lolita who swept in his libidinous travels across the continent like a dust storm, as a “salad” of mixed genes. That is, he was French, Austrian, English, with a “dash of the Danube.” And to some extent the “salad” defines most of the distinguished exiles. They were German or Hungarian or Russian, but they were also very much European and had moved about from country to country for education and inspiration. Einstein himself lived as a youth in Munich and Milan and was graduated from the Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, where he became a Swiss citizen. He was a professor also in Prague, and when his fame was established he accepted the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Had he not then resumed his German citizenship he could not, as a Jew, have been deprived of it and his property in 1933.

As we know, this European arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and became for America the iconographical “genius,” the abstruse incarnate, and also the liberal and tormented spirit about nuclear weapons and civic affairs.

Nabokov, Stravinsky, and Balanchine, Europeans from St. Petersburg by way of the Russian Revolution, do not quite create in our minds the sense of some tremendous and unique burden borne through life. They were not Jewish—Nabokov’s wife was Jewish—and they maintained their “Russianness,” which had about it an ineffable charm not often granted to “Germanness.” Of course, the Russians’ memories were of loss of countryside, of language, and like all refugees, they came from a cemetery.

The Firebird was performed in Paris in 1910 and Stravinsky came to America later as a supreme example and influence in world music. Nabokov, who had continued to write in Russian in Germany and France, began here to write in English and to put Humbert Humbert and Professor Pnin into a fantastical American landscape. Where there is an overwhelming invention of style and conception, as with Schoenberg in California, citizenship and placement are simply existence honored and not matters of creative additions. With Balanchine a perfect reciprocity was accomplished—the wedding of imperial Russian technique with American dancers and, when he wished it, the complicated tonalities of a kind of American aura.

Henry Kissinger, so extraordinarily visible and palpable, has never quite disengaged his Germanness, his boyhood in Fürth, but that is surely merely his inextinguishable accent and little else. This curious émigré, or rather this most curious one among the émigrés, has an innate American flair. He alone, among the figures who come to mind, seems to express the old will to exploit the continent, build the railroads, get the copper out of the ground. Still, a Continental sophistication and a Mitteleuropa skill at diplomatic maneuver somehow inform his American endeavors. His “image” announces that he is both the Old World and us in a high-flown, canny admixture.

If for Kissinger the United States was still the frontier, the country acted in a custodial mode for many of the others. At the Institute in Princeton the custodial gesture was elaborate, courtly, and rather daunting. Gödel and Von Neumann and Einstein under the trees and spires at the end of the ride through the industrial wasteland of New Jersey. And Panofsky and Auerbach and Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch: one does not like to line them up like a very large cast in Playbill.

The New School for Social Research was, by comparison, a modest practicality, utilitarian and saving for many contentious thinkers, among them the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and the political historians Hans Kohn and Hans Morgenthau. Nevertheless, no institution in America was a convent, a retreat. Instead, the refugee world was a battlefield—they fought among themselves, about ideas, and often they struggled with the new country itself. They were ambitious, often arrogant, often rivalrous. The quarrels and differences among them are very interestingly described in Anthony Heilbut’s Exiled in Paradise.

And they came into the postwar world of the H-bomb, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. Thomas Mann returned to Europe in disillusionment. Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Einstein, and Leo Szilard, preeminent figures of the nuclear age, disagreed painfully and in ways that were important for themselves and for the country. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem aroused ferocious controversy.

Many of the émigrés became teachers, and perhaps it is not amiss to think of them as exercising a certain imperial, if uncoercive, role among our young artists and thinkers. The Bauhaus architects dominated the skyline and the professional schools in an almost military fashion. They left a vast and often beautiful permanency of steel and concrete even the most aggressive postmodernism cannot undo, for such is the nature of buildings. Tom Wolfe expressed his native’s chagrin at the imposition of “foreign forms,” but his advocacy of a sort of containment of idea in architecture, and painting as well, implies that the America the refugee professionals entered was a sort of Maginot Line, self-important but easily outflanked. And of course this was not true. As a part of the civilized community we were already knowledgeable about theorems, physics, the unconscious, atonalism, Cubism, European fiction and poetry, and the general ideas in circulation. No one ever knows just why certain notions prevail in historical periods except that they serve the creative impulses at large.

Still, there was a need for buildings and there was the money to build them with, and the triumph of the Bauhaus group was indeed noticeable. Psychiatry also seemed to find here a peculiar local demand, as if it were some happy interest-bearing note. “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin,” Philip Roth’s Dr. Spielvogel says. Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, and the manic futurist Wilhelm Reich—in combination a fantastical therapeutic spread—achieved what one might call a reinforced definition. And not to speak of those emblematic practitioners in their intense occupation of New York’s Central Park West and Park Avenue.

“Stone by stone we shall remove the Alhambra, the Kremlin and the Louvre and build them anew on the banks of the Hudson.”—Benjamin de Casseres, 1925. De Casseres spoke of “things,” treasures of antiquity and every period following, bought and displayed and owned. He could not know that the Hudson Valley was to be the collector and connoisseur of the actual bodies of creative Europe. France and England and Switzerland had been the custodians for centuries—Herzen and Turgenev, Marx.

Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns

There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces

The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

—LOUIS MACNEICE, “The British Museum Reading Room”

New York, Manhattan—a fanatical urbanism, a spectacle, a metaphorical landing place. So if you are banished from Frankfurt, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or Warsaw, there is left no possibility except the twentieth-century capital. The city of the future, peculiar, uncomfortable, an orphan brilliant indeed, and no matter the lack of a family album of monuments, cathedrals, old squares, and palaces. Manhattan itself, with those early pictorial towers that seem to end in a medicating hypodermic needle, is one of the “characters” of the last fifty years. Its purpose is to be exploited, whereas the purpose of the Old World cities is to exist as a slowly accreting density and storehouse of the national history. New Amsterdam: Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and the austere Dutchman himself in his studio on the East Side.

“What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus lighted the venomous colors that flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?”—Dali in New York. (This quotation and the preceding one from de Casseres are found in a work of almost frenzied brilliance and originality: Delirious New York, 1978, by the young Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.)

In America we are not a Folk in the manner of the Germans, French, English, and even the Russians. We are too self-created, vagrant, of too random and unpredictable congruence for that. The claim to insist upon a folk by the negation “unAmerican” is a bullying and unhistorical folly. The elite émigrés met here not only the great wealth of the country and the Bill of Rights but a rich and porous ground. For the general dissemination of ideas a physical presence is not necessary. The exception is the A-bomb and the H-bomb, the most spectacular achievements of émigré science and perhaps of any science in that the terms of everything were altered forever. In this case the American presence of Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller at Los Alamos was of an overwhelming significance, spanning the limits of science, politics, the direction—still unknown—of human history.

The aggressiveness of American mass culture was a challenge many of the refugees seemed unprepared for, even if they were not dilatory in abstracting principles from it. Their complicated intrusions and failures in Hollywood have their own formidably detailed history. Nothing could soften the final fact that this elite was unlike any other. They had been the objects of the worst and most powerfully organized evil intentions the world had ever known. Whatever Weimar or Viennese café-pride they exhibited was only a manner, a style. It was painful to learn to write in English, or to remain, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, a writer in Yiddish slowly finding his audience in the fiercely competitive glut of American fiction.

Surely the only happy exile is based upon caprice and personal taste—French food, sunlight all the year, cheap villas, servants, old cultures, and sometimes merely the escape from a too dear and watchful family and village. Finding Oxford and Cambridge too “down-home” seemed to have spurred the transition of Auden, Isherwood, and Huxley. In the end the most striking thing about the exiles’ great influence on our times is that it was marked by a certain equity. What we offered to them and what we received in return was accomplished with rare historical and human balance.

1983

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