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The Weimar Century
German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War
By Udi Greenberg PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5239-0
CHAPTER 1
The Search for "Responsible Elites"
CARL J. FRIEDRICH AND THE REFORM OF HIGHER EDUCATION
When U.S. occupation forces arrived in Germany in 1945, they confronted the daunting task of thoroughly rebuilding German thought and culture. After twelve long years of Nazi dictatorship, Americans believed that Germans needed not only new political institutions but also new values and norms to prevent them from reverting to violence and war. Nazism, however, had permeated every aspect of Germany society. Its racist and militarist ideology penetrated books, movies, art, and all major cultural institutions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Germany's universities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany had built the most extensive and prestigious university system in Europe. Its scientists, political thinkers, and scholars drew admiration from around the world. By 1945, however, German universities were thoroughly Nazified, either by coercion or through professors' enthusiastic support for the Third Reich. The country's most renowned centers of thought had given their massive research, publishing, and teaching apparatus over to the service of Nazism's racist ideology, war, and genocide. In their mission to reshape German culture, U.S. diplomats, educators, and philanthropists thus stormed the campuses of Heidelberg, Munich, Gottingen, and the rest of Germany's institutions of higher education. They ushered in a plethora of new democratic curricula, research projects, and international student-exchange programs, seeking to instill values that would transform the postwar German state into a stable and peaceful democracy.
The U.S. occupation authorities did not focus on German universities solely to displace the Nazis, though this was a central goal. Rather, they saw higher education as the solution to a fundamental conundrum of democratizing Germany: how to build a stable democratic system that would not again fall prey to mass movements or charismatic dictators? In their eyes, the answer was the cultivation of new democratic elites, who had the breadth of knowledge, the skills, and the vision to manage democracy in the interests of the people. For U.S. authorities, universities were key to creating a democratic managerial class that would mold Germany's future and prevent a return to aggressive militarism. In this elitist conception of democracy, German universities had to quickly train thousands of teachers, bureaucrats, doctors, and lawyers and inculcate in them new values of peaceful political norms. These new norms, in turn, would trickle down to the rest of the population and foster democratic consensus. As economist and Rockefeller Foundation official Joseph Willits put it, "German universities ... [which] train talented individuals for active leadership in society, will shape the conditions, for good or ill, and the leaders of whatever new German society may emerge."
In contrast to many scholars' claims, however, the educational revolution brought by the U.S. occupation was not merely an American response to war. Rather, the massive reorganization of German higher education also resurrected intellectual programs, educational institutions, and international networks from the 1920s. The best embodiment of this continuation was the Calvinist political theorist Carl J. Friedrich. As a young intellectual in Heidelberg, Friedrich developed a highly idiosyncratic and pro-democratic theory of religion and politics. As part of his attempt to mobilize German Protestants in support of the Weimar Republic, he argued that democracy emerged from German Protestant Christianity, and specifically German Calvinism. Germany therefore had to join a democratic alliance with other Protestant republics, especially the United States. In this narrative, democracy was based not on individual rights and liberalism but on peaceful cooperation between Christian communities. Like the Calvinist concept of the "covenant"—a voluntary association of people—democracy drew from the people's consent. In Friedrich's vision, however, the people did not represent themselves. Rather, democracy was dependent on "responsible" elites who guided and represented these political communities. While "ordinary" people could easily fall prey to the pull of mass movements or charismatic leaders, which would destroy the covenant, well-trained and highly educated leaders would defy extremist politics to act in the broader interests of society. Democracy, then, was the work of elites who defended freedom from its reckless, plebian enemies.
Before World War II, Friedrich had claimed that the stability of democracy relied on higher education: German universities needed to support the Weimar Republic and train the responsible elite necessary for democracy. During the 1920s, this was an exceptional vision among German academics. Since most professors and students came from conservative backgrounds and detested the new Weimar Republic, German universities were hubs of nationalist and anti-democratic fervor. Friedrich, however, sought to transform these centers of knowledge and teaching into an organ of the democratic state. In a series of bold endeavors, he founded educational institutions, curricula, and academic exchange programs in Heidelberg designed to create a democratic elite. As part of his goal to reform German academia, Friedrich fostered an unexpected alliance between American philanthropists from the Rockefeller Foundation, Weimar politicians, and German academics.
These visions and networks of elite democratic education did not collapse with Weimar in 1933. Rather, they also helped facilitate the epoch- making transformation of American higher education. After moving to the United States in 1926, Friedrich drew on the same top-down political visions to bring about unprecedented cooperation between American universities and the U.S. government. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he taught at Harvard University, where he re-created the programs and curricula that he had first developed in Heidelberg. Together with German and American educators and philanthropists he had come to know in Germany, Friedrich established a series of programs and institutions that included Harvard's Graduate School for Public Administration and later the School of Overseas Administration. These endeavors brought together policymakers, academics, and Rockefeller Foundation officials to train young men in the service of the U.S. government, military, and intelligence communities. This blurring of the boundaries between academia and state policy would become the norm during the early Cold War. Scholars continued to voluntarily cooperate with diplomats, policymakers, and intelligence officials, conducting research that would aid the struggle against domestic and international communism. Friedrich helped provide the language for this revolution. His writings explained why universities' cooperation with the state and voluntary suppression of Communist dissent were not a threat to academic freedom but essential for democracy. As in Heidelberg, American universities were not a site to critically assess the use of state power; rather, they were to serve as an organ of the state to train responsible democratic elites.
It was the same ideas and networks that Friedrich brought back to Germany after World War II. In the postwar era, his claim that democracy required responsible elites resonated with Americans and West Germans anxious to move beyond the trauma of Nazism. This was especially true during the 1950s, when fears of fascism were replaced by anxieties about Communist expansion. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, German intellectuals, and U.S. diplomats, Friedrich helped retool German higher education for the training of this elite. By resurrecting democratic curricula, research agendas, and exchange programs that he founded in Weimar and then expanded at Harvard, he helped transform West German universities into organs of the transatlantic alliance and anti-Communist mobilization. This time, German-American cooperation had lasting legacies. Rather than remaining an exception in German higher education, Friedrich's curricula, political theory, and exchange programs became the norm in postwar education. Like their counterparts in the United States, West German universities developed into organs of Cold War thought and politics. What was once on the margins of Weimar thought became the center of postwar order.
Protestant Legitimacy and Elite Education in Heidelberg
When the democratic revolution swept Germany in the fall of 1918, German Protestants reacted with shock, anger, and disbelief. Traditionally the most ardent supporters of German nationalism and imperialism, Germany's majority Protestant population had long associated the Protestant monarchy with their own "natural" hegemony in German life. In their eyes, democracy, with its political equality and seeming disregard for traditional authority, was a tool of foreign enemies, especially the French, to destroy Christianity and divide the German nation. This hostility toward democratic norms only intensified as the Weimar revolution seemed to realize Protestants' worst fears. After the first elections empowered a coalition of Socialists, Catholics, and liberals—all equally hated by Protestants—the new republic dismantled the imperial bond between "throne and altar" by removing Protestantism as the state religion. Protestant intellectuals and politicians responded by repeatedly attacking the Weimar Republic as a monstrous, secular, and foreign assault on German Christianity. As Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch wrote, "Christian love ... must resist a democratic regime." Throughout Weimar's short existence, most Protestants flocked to nationalist right-wing parties and openly hoped the republic would be replaced by an authoritarian form of government. Their fierce opposition remained Weimar's Achilles heel.
Yet a small group of Protestant thinkers challenged this political consensus. Under the leadership of Protestant priest and politician Friedrich Naumann, theologians such as Ernst Troeltsch and Otto Baumgarten vocally supported the new republic. In their minds, democracy was an inevitable product of modern society and rising mass involvement in politics. Germany had to embrace this transformation or face never-ending clashes between the people and the state. As Troeltsch anxiously pleaded, only by allowing all citizens to participate in democratic politics could Germany avoid "a volcano of misery ... and civil wars." The most important of these Protestant intellectuals was the sociologist Max Weber. A towering figure in German political thought, Weber argued that republican regimes were the best mechanism to ensure that leaders adhered to "the ethics of responsibility"' He believed that the catastrophe of World War I had stemmed from the romantic and irresponsible tendencies that permeated the entire German political system and drove it to reckless political adventures. He therefore asserted that political institutions should facilitate the rise of talented and responsible leaders, who by the power of their natural charisma would guide the people through the "diabolical" temptations of politics. Despite his elitist distrust of the masses, which he shared with most German Protestants, Weber claimed that the electoral process was more likely to bring charismatic and responsible leaders to power than a hereditary monarchy. Before his untimely death in 1920, Weber institutionalized these ideas by participating in the drafting of the Weimar Constitution and by helping secure a strong executive branch. During the early 1920s, his followers worked to build Protestant support for the republic. Despite their small numbers, they remained among Weimar's most important architects and defenders.
This dual campaign to recruit German Protestants in support of the republic and to produce "responsible" democratic elites stood at the core of Friedrich's early work. Born to a middle-class Calvinist family from Dresden, Friedrich began his career in Heidelberg, at Germany's oldest and most prestigious university. There he joined a group of ambitious young thinkers, such as Alexander Rustow and Arnold Bergstraesser, who gathered around Alfred Weber, Max's younger brother and a renowned sociologist in his own right. Like his older brother, Alfred Weber was convinced that democracy was the ultimate facilitator of elitist "creative genius." His students, who embraced the republic, became known as members of the "Weber School" During the Weimar period, Friedrich served as Weber's closest disciple and assistant, and in 1930 he completed his PhD dissertation on American politics and economy under Weber's supervision. After moving to the United States to accept a job offer in 1926, he began lecturing at Harvard University, but he remained involved in Heidelberg's programs and committed to Weber's political mission. Throughout the Weimar era, Friedrich expanded on Weber's pro-republic intellectual project as both a theoretician and an educator. He crafted a new theory on the republic's Protestant origins and helped establish a network of educational programs to train "responsible" democratic elites. The Nazis would abruptly crush these efforts in 1933. But the early ideas, networks, and organizations that stemmed from the "Weber School" would provide the blueprint for intellectual transformations in the decades to come.
Friedrich's efforts to strengthen the Weimar Republic began by crafting a new political theory that framed democracy as the realization of Christian principles. Recasting Protestants' belief in their self-evident superiority, he claimed that Protestantism's genius was best reflected not in monarchy, but in republican institutions. According to Friedrich, the Weimar-era parliamentary system had not emerged from the secular Enlightenment and the anti-religious French Revolution, as most Protestants believed. Rather, its origins lay in the unique traditions of Calvinist Christianity first developed in German-speaking central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was no accident, Friedrich wrote, that "the centers of democracy are countries with a predominantly Calvinist tradition," such as "Switzerland, the United States, and Holland" rather than revolutionary France. There was an organic connection between Calvinism and democratic politics. By establishing an unexpected narrative that rooted the republic in the Calvinist creed, Friedrich believed he could dismantle Protestant objections to Weimar and channel their political energies toward democratic participation. He further hoped to guide German Protestants, who were mostly staunch nationalists, toward international cooperation with other democracies.
At the center of this democratic genealogy, Friedrich placed the work of German Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius (1563–1638). A prominent lawyer in the independent German-speaking city of Emden, Althusius published a series of books on politics, religion, and law. While his writings received some attention during the imperial era, by the Weimar period he was largely forgotten and his works were out of print. In Friedrich's eyes, however, Althusius was a giant of modern political and religious thought, "the clearest and most profound thinker which Calvinism has produced in the realm of political science and jurisprudence." For Friedrich, Althusius was the first to explain that political authority stemmed from the people, not from the monarchy, and that Protestant convictions were best embodied in republican regimes. In 1926 Friedrich embarked on a mission to restore Althusius and his ideas to the center of Western political theory. After long years of collecting rare copies, in 1932 he published a new version of Althusius's monumental 1614 Politica Methodice Digesta (Systematic analysis of politics). In a long introduction, Friedrich argued that Althusius's "Calvinist cosmology" opened the path to modern democracy. The seventeenth-century theoretician, he emphasized, explained democratic institutions "[i]n terms of [a] Protestant ethic" rather than by way of the hated French Enlightenment "humanitarianism."
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Excerpted from The Weimar Century by Udi Greenberg. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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