"In the Shadow of Nazi Rule: Two Generation Units of Social Scientists." A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research. Fleck, Christian. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 111–164. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781849662932.ch-004>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 03:03 UTC. Copyright © Christian Fleck 2011. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 IN THE SHADOW OF NAZI RULE: TWO GENERATION UNITS OF SOCIAL SCIENTISTS At the end of the first third of the twentieth century, German-language sociology suffered a dramatic caesura. For a long time, René König’s dictum that after 1933 the discipline had been ‘brought to a brutal standstill’ (König 1958: 14) was accepted as the ultimate description of the impact of the Nazis’ rise to power on sociology. Helmut Schelsky’s contrary opinion, at the time, that ‘it was our sociol- ogy itself that had run out of subject matter, the melodies had all been played through, the fronts were consolidating, and little evolutionary momentum was left within the discipline itself’ (Schelsky 1959: 36), did not register. Decades later the debate resurfaced under the new heading of ‘sociology in National Socialism’ (Rammstedt 1985; Klingemann 1996). At the end of his life, König vehemently protested against what he felt to be an exculpation of Nazi sociologists (König 1987). The debate, fraught with polemics, criticism and counter-criticism, carried on for some time and ran dry without any consensus being reached. The present study is not aiming for consensus either, but proposes a new perspective. Analysing the career paths of the sociologists of the time may indeed shed new light on the repercussions of the year 1933 (or, for Austria, 1938). First of all, a collective biography of German-speaking sociologists should identify the commonalities as well as the differences that marked this genera- tion. Karl Mannheim’s concept of Generationseinheit (generation unit) seems the adequate tool for drawing a comparison between those who emigrated and those who did not. In his essay ‘The Problem of Generations’ (Mannheim 1952), first published in 1928, Mannheim distinguished between generation, social location of a generation and generation unit. Given the ‘similarity of location … within a social whole’, Mannheim came to the conclusion that a generation tends to show something like a ‘characteristic mode of thought and experience’ (Mannheim 1952: 291). Often, however, the similarity of location as such does not suffice as a basis for postulating a generational bond. For the latter to emerge, there must be something like a common destiny. Within a 111 FFleck.indbleck.indb 111111 003/02/113/02/11 55:56:56 PPMM A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences generational bond constituted by certain political and historical facts, there may be contrasting generation units, differing in their way of coping with the same historical and political macro-event: ‘Youth experiencing the same con- crete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways, constitute separate generation units’ (Mannheim 1952: 304). In the present case, the con- cept of separate generations clearly suggests itself. Secondly, a comparison between two science cultures that can be identified in terms of nation states is also attempted here: situations in Germany and Austria were different, but the common language certainly made the inhabit- ants of these countries more similar to each other than to the inhabitants of other states. Table 4.1 gives a preliminary idea of these differences. While the number of universities and students is rather close to the base value of the population, the other ratios clearly differ. In Austria there were more univer- sity teachers, and the 1938 dismissal rate for Austria was slightly higher than the 1933 rate for Germany. There are remarkable differences in the last two cells, but one has allow for the fact that there have as yet been few – indeed, hardly any – contributions by Austrians to the editorial decisions of the pub- lications (Hagemann and Krohn 1999a; Hagemann and Krohn 1999b; Smelser and Baltes 2001) used to estimate the figures. Table 4.1 Ratios between Austria and Germany For every 100 Germans account for … Austrians Population (1930s) 10 Universities (1930s) 13 Students (1930s) 15 Teaching staff (1930s) 30 Dismissed professors (1933 and 1938, resp.) 34 Grantees of the Emergency Committee (1933–44) 20 Émigré Economists (1933–45) 43 Leading Social Scientists (20th Century) 77 Sources: Population: Mitchell 1992. Universities, Students and Teaching staff: Titze 1987; Völlmecke 1979. Dismissed professors: for Germany – A Crisis in the University World 1935; for Austria – Archive of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning 1938. Grantees of the Emergency Committee: Files of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, New York Public Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Division, New York; Duggan and Drury 1948; émigré economists – Krohn and Hagemann 1999; leading social scientists – Smelser and Baltes 2001. Author’s calculations. Third, to allow for the effects of the change of political regimes to show, and for individual career paths to be traced, a period spanning three decades from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s was chosen for analysis here. The starting point is 112 FFleck.indbleck.indb 111212 003/02/113/02/11 55:56:56 PPMM In the Shadow of Nazi Rule: Two Generation Units of Social Scientists early enough, with respect to the handing over of power to the Nazis, to allow us to establish the positions held before change set in, and the end is late enough, with respect to the time when most of the emigrants had left the German-language area, to allow us to reconstruct their careers after displacement. It furthermore enables us to account for the dangers faced by non-emigrants, such as military service and imprisonment, likely to have caused breaks in their careers. Fourth, the following specifically concerns sociology. This is easier said than done, for while sociology as an intellectual project was not at all uncommon in the German-language area, it did not exist as a formal discipline, i.e. in an institution- alized form. One thus comes up against a number of difficulties when trying to establish the boundaries of sociology as a discipline-in-the–making. Doing so hor- izontally among the social sciences – delimiting sociology from other disciplines – is difficult since the latter were far from being clearly outlined. In the German-language area, the emergence of the ‘third science culture’ (Lepenies 1985) was different and slower than that of other countries. As for the date that marks the beginning of sociology as a scientific discipline, there is no consensus at all. WHO IS A SOCIOLOGIST? Right after the problem of how to delimit a discipline from its neighbours, there is the problem of whom to count among its members. Who makes up the very top of the status hierarchy is just as uncontroversial as the very bottom, the students. Full professors seldom become ignored, while the many gradu- ates of a discipline are rarely given any more room in its history than is needed for some statistics. But what about those in between? Limiting investigations to sociologists with a university affiliation or, even more restrictively, to those who were actually qualified as lecturers or professors, would be too narrow a definition of the population, since it means excluding a number of scholars who today are definitely considered part of the history of sociology. Nor does it help much to consult the ‘membership list’ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS, German Sociological Association, Austrians included) to identify German-speaking sociologists in the first half of the twen- tieth century. The DGS existed from 1910, but since it conceived of itself as an association of notables, eligibility for membership was severely restricted. And since there is no other membership list of the proto-discipline, the only way to establish the population is to reconstruct it on the basis of contemporaneous classifications and later delimitations. This may be done by (a) relying on self- reports; (b) using an independent definition as a basis for a reconstruction of the group; (c) referring to similar attempts by others; or (d) relying on reports by contemporary or latter-day peers. (a) Relying on Self-reports: Anyone Calling Him or Herself a Sociologist is a Sociologist One way of defining sociology is to say that it is what sociologists do. So, as an analogy, one way to count the membership of this discipline may be to label as 113 FFleck.indbleck.indb 111313 003/02/113/02/11 55:56:56 PPMM A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences sociologists all those who claim to be so. An excellent contemporaneous source for this is Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten Kalender . Between 1926 and 1950, six issues were published of this ‘Who’s Who’ of German-language scholars, and sociology is indeed included in the index of disciplines in the 1926 issue for the first time. A search of the indices of names in those six issues of the Kürschners results in a total of two hundred and seventy male and seven female (2 per cent) sociologists. Almost half of the names appear only once, one-fifth appear twice, and only thirty-five individuals (12 per cent) appear as often as four times or more within these twenty-five years.