Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (70 page)

But Kazin, as that quote at the beginning of his last chapter showed, felt that since 1933 Europe had been closed and that now, in 1942, American literature, for all its faults and its love-hate affair with business, was ‘the repository of
Western culture in a world overrun by fascism.’
¹¹⁹
This, he felt, was a profound shift, coinciding with a reawakening of America’s own tradition. The stock market crash and the rise of fascism, which led many in Europe to question capitalism and to gravitate to Russia, had the effect in the United States of driving Americans back on themselves, to a moral transformation realised through nationalism as a coalescing force that, at the same time, would counteract the excesses of business, industrialisation, and science. For Kazin, this nationalism was not blind or parochial: it was a kind of conscience, which gave America dignity. Literature was only part of this society-wide trend, but Kazin thought that its role could only grow in the future. That was cold comfort too.

A parallel with Kazin’s main thesis, albeit in a very different medium, can be found in what for some people is the greatest film ever made, released not long before
On Native Grounds
appeared. This was Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane
(1941). Welles, born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was a prodigy, an innovative man of the theatre and radio by his mid-twenties, during which time he had staged a successful
Macbeth
with black actors, and startled the entire nation with his version of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds,
presented as a news program, which many people were panicked into believing was a real invasion from Mars. He was brought to Hollywood while he was still in his early twenties and given a virtually unique contract in which he was to write, direct, and star in his own movies.

Destined by his bulky frame to play ‘big’ characters (as he himself put it), he sought a subject for his first, much-publicised and much-awaited movie and hit on Kane, it seems, because his first wife, Virginia Nicholson, had married the nephew of Marion Davies, the film star who lived with William Randolph Hearst.
¹²⁰
Citizen Kane
was filmed in great secrecy, partly for publicity purposes and partly to prevent Hearst finding out, and some effort was made for legal reasons to distance the main character from the newspaper baron. But the fact remains that the film is about a media mogul who uses his power to help the theatrical career of his consort, while living in a palatial mansion peopled by an esoteric mix of friends and hangers-on. There was really no disguising who Kane was, and for a time, when filming had been completed, there was doubt as to whether the film would be released, RKO fearing a massive libel and invasion-of-privacy suit from Hearst. In the event Hearst did not sue, but some cinema chains did not carry or show the film for fear of him. Partly for that reason (and partly because, as impresario Sol Hurok said of the punters, ‘If they don’t want to come, nothing will stop them’),
Citizen Kane
was not a commercial success.

It was, however, a massive critical and artistic success. To begin with, it introduced technical innovations on a wide scale. This was partly the work of the cameraman, Gregg Toland, and of Linwood Dunn, in the special effects department.
¹²¹
In those days, special effects did not mean creating beings from outer space, but filming scenes more than once, so that, for example, all that greets the eye is in focus, thus providing an experience more akin to theatre – quite new in cinema. Welles also played scenes from beginning to end without
intercuts and with the camera following the action. He himself, in the role of Kane, aged some fifty years – the makeup on the film was another major special effect. Other technical innovations were the introduction of a ‘newsreel’ into the film, to tell the life story of Kane. The film had its corny elements: at the beginning a reporter is set off on an ‘investigation’ to find the meaning of Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud.’ But people were impressed.

When the film finally premiered, in three separate cities, the reviews were ecstatic: ‘sensational’
(New York Times);
‘magnificent’
(New York Herald Tribune);
‘masterpiece’
(New York World-Telegram);
‘unfettered intelligence’
(New York Post);
‘Something new has come to the movie world at last’ (the
New Yorker).
¹²²
The more partisan right-wing press accused Welles of mounting a Communist attack on Hearst, and this is where the link to Kazin’s thesis comes in. For
Kane
was an attack on big business, but not so much a political attack, such as a regular Communist might have made, but a psychological attack.
Kane
shows that, for all a man’s possessions, for all his power, his vast acres and thousands of sculptures that populate those acres, he may lack – as does Kane – an emotional core, and remain lonely and unloved. This was scarcely a new message, as Kazin had shown, but in America at the end of the 1930s, it was no less powerful for all that, especially in the way that Welles told it. The enigma that has remained (Jorge Luis Borges called Kane a labyrinth without a centre) is whether Welles meant the film to have a cold centre too.
¹²³
He once said that personality was unknowable (‘Throw away all biographies’), and it is at least possible that another aim of the film was to show this unknowability in Kane. In general, though, the verdict of his critics is that this aspect of the film was a failure, rather than an intentional device.

Riches, for Welles, as for Kane – as indeed for Hearst – were cold comfort. The rest of Welles’s career was ready a coda to his early flowering and the magnificence of
Kane.
The film had closed everywhere by the end of the year, before Kazin’s book appeared. After that, it was for Welles – albeit very slowly – downhill all the way.

A famous photograph exists, taken on the occasion of an exhibition,
Artists in Exile,
at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in March 1942. Pierre Matisse, the son of the painter, Henri Matisse, had been a successful dealer in Manhattan since the early 1930s, but there had been no show like this one. Pictured in the photograph, all dressed ‘respectably’ in suits or tweed jackets, are: (front row) Matta, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger; (back row) André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tchelitchev, Kurt Seligmann, and Eugene Berman. Such a range and quality of artistic talent can seldom, if ever, have been gathered together in one room, and critics felt the same about the art on display.
American Mercury
headlined its review of the show ‘Hitler’s Gift to America.
¹

Between January 1933 and December 1941, 104,098 German and Austrian refugees arrived in America, of whom 7,622 were academics and another 1,500 were artists, journalists specialising in cultural matters, or other intellectuals. The trickle that began in 1933 swelled after Kristallnacht in 1938, but it never reached a flood. By then it had been made difficult for many to leave, and anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant feeling generally in America, meant that many were turned away. The United States had operated a quota system since 1924, limiting immigration to 165,000, with each Caucasian nation represented in the 1890 census restricted to 2 percent of their numbers at that time. The quotas for Austrian and German immigrants actually remained unfilled throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a little-known statistic of shame for the United States among its many acts of humanitarianism.

Other artists and academics fled to Amsterdam, London, or Paris. In the French capital Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich, and Gert Wollheim formed the Collective of German Artists, and then later the Free League of Artists, which held a counter-exhibition to the Nazi
Entartete Kunst
(Degenerate Art) show in Munich. In Amsterdam Max Beckmann, Eugen Spiro, Heinrich Campendonck, and the Bauhaus architect Hajo Rose formed a close-knit group, for which Paul Citroën’s private art school served as a focus. In London such artists as John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Meidner, and Oskar Kokoschka were the most well known in an intellectual community of exiles that was about two hundred strong, organised into the Free German League of
Culture by the Artists’ Refugee Committee, the New English Arts Club, and the Royal Academy. The league’s most potent gesture was its
Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art
held in the New Burlington Galleries in 1938. The tide was deliberately bland, so as not to offend the government, then embarked on its policy of appeasing Hitler. When war broke out, Heartfield and Schwitters were interned as enemy aliens.
²
In Germany itself, artists such as Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, and Oskar Schlemmer retreated into what they called ‘inner exile.’ Dix hid away at Lake Constance, where he painted landscapes; that, he said, was ‘tantamount to emigration.’
³
Karl SchmidtRottluff and Erich Heckel removed themselves to obscure hamlets, hoping to escape attention. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was so depressed by the whole business that he took his life.

But it was the emigration to the United States that was most important and significant, and not only because of the numbers involved. As a result of that intellectual migration, the landscape of twentieth-century thought was changed dramatically. It was probably the greatest transfer of its kind ever seen.

After Hitler’s inquisition had become plain for all to see, emergency committees were set up in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland, of which two may be singled out. In Britain the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) was formed by the heads of British universities, under Sir William Beveridge of the LSE. By November 1938 it had placed 524 persons in academic positions in 36 countries, 161 in the United States. Many members of British universities taxed their own salaries between 2 and 3 percent to raise money, and there were American academics who, hearing of this, sent equivalent proportions across the Atlantic. In this way the AAC raised some £30,000. (It was not finally disbanded until 1966, continuing to support academics in other countries who were persecuted for political or racial reasons.) A group of refugee German scholars established the Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad. This sought to place colleagues in employment where it could, but it also produced a detailed list of 1,500 names of Germans dismissed from their academic posts, which proved very useful for other societies as the years passed. The Emergency Society also took advantage of the fact that in Turkey, in spring 1933, Ataturk reorganised the University of Istanbul, as part of his drive to Westernise the country. German scholars (among them Paul Hindemith) were taken on under this scheme and a similar one, in 1935, when the Istanbul law school was upgraded to a university. These scholars even established their own academic journal, since it was so difficult for them to publish either back home or in Britain or in the United States. The journal carried papers on anything from dermatology to Sanskrit. Its issues are collectors’ items now.
⁴

The German journal in Turkey only lasted for eighteen issues. A more enduring gift from Hitler was a very different periodical,
Mathematical Reviews.
The first issue of this new journal went largely unremarked when it appeared – most people had other things on their minds in 1939. But, in its own quiet way, the appearance of
MR,
as mathematicians soon began calling it, was both
dramatic and significant. Until that time, the most important mathematical periodical, which abstracted articles from all over the world, in dozens of languages, was the
Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete,
launched in 1931, by Springer Verlag in Berlin. Thanks partly to the golden age of physics, but also to the work of Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Godei, mathematics was proliferating, and a comprehensive abstracting journal helped people keep in touch.
⁵
In 1933—4, however, a problem loomed: the journal’s editor, Otto Neugebauer, a faculty member in Richard Courant’s famous department at Göttingen, was politically suspect. In 1934, he escaped to Denmark. He remained a board member of the
Zentralblatt
until 1938, but then the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, who was a fellow board member and Jewish, was dismissed. Neugebauer resigned in sympathy, together with several members of the international advisory board. At the end of the year the Russian involvement on the board was also terminated, and refugee mathematicians were even banned as reviewers. An article in
Science
reported that articles by Jews now went unabstracted in the
Zentralblatt.

American mathematicians watched the situation with dismay and alarm. At first they considered buying the title, but the Berlin company wouldn’t sell. Springer did, however, make a counter-suggestion, offering two editorial boards, which would have produced different versions of the journal, one for the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union, the other for Germany and nearby countries. American mathematicians were so incensed by this insult that in May 1939 they voted to establish their own journal.
⁶

As early as April 1933 officials at the Rockefeller Foundation began to consider how they might help individual scholars. Funds were found for an emergency committee, which started work in May. This committee had to move carefully, for the depression was still hurting, and jobs were scarce. The first task was to assess the size of the problem. In October 1933, Edward R. Murrow, vice chairman of the emergency committee, calculated that upward of 2,000 scholars, out of a total of 27,000, had been dropped from 240 institutions. That was a lot of people, and wholesale immigration not only risked displacing American scholars but might trigger anti-Semitism. A form of words was needed that would confine the numbers who were encouraged to cross the Atlantic and in the end the emergency committee decided that its policy would be ‘to help scholarship, rather than relieve suffering.’ Thus they concentrated on older scholars, whose achievements were already acknowledged. The most well known beneficiary was Richard Courant from Göttingen.
⁷

The two mathematicians who did most to help their German-speaking colleagues were Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) and R. G. D. Richardson (1878–1949). The former, a nephew of Thorstein Veblen, the great social theorist, was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, while Richardson was chairman of the mathematics department at Brown University and secretary of the American Mathematical Society. With the aid of the society, which formally joined the emergency committee, fifty-one
mathematicians were brought to America before the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939; and by the end of the war the total migration was just under 150. Every scholar, whatever his or her age, found work. Put alongside the six million Jews who perished in the gas ovens, 150 doesn’t sound much; yet there were more mathematicians helped than any other professional group. Today, out of the top eight world-class mathematics institutes, the United States has three. Germany has none.
⁸

In addition to the artists, musicians, and mathematicians who were brought to America, there were 113 senior biologists and 107 world-class physicists whose decisive influence on the outcome of the war we shall meet in chapter 22. Scholars were also helped by a special provision in the U.S. immigration law, created by the State Department in 1940, which allowed for ‘emergency visitor’ visas, available to imperilled refugees ‘whose intellectual or cultural achievements or political activities were of interest to the United States.’ Max Reinhardt, the theatre director, Stefan Zweig, the writer, and Roman Jakobson, the linguist, all entered the United States on emergency visas.
⁹

Of all the various schemes to help refugees whose work was deemed important in the intellectual sphere, none was so extraordinary, or so effective, as the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) organised by the American Friends of German Freedom. The Friends had been formed in America by the ousted German socialist leader Paul Hagen (also known as Karl Frank), to raise money for anti-Nazi work. In June 1940, three days after France signed the armistice with Germany, with its notorious ‘surrender on demand’ clause, the committee’s members held a lunch to consider what now needed to be done to help threatened individuals in the new, much more dangerous situation.
¹⁰
The ERC was the result, and $3,000 was raised immediately. The aim, broached at the lunch, was to prepare a list of important intellectuals – scholars, writers, artists, musicians – who were at risk and would be eligible for special visa status. One of the committee’s members,
Varian Fry,
was chosen to go to France, to find as many threatened intellectuals as he could and help them to safety.

Fry, a slight, bespectacled Harvard graduate, had been in Germany in 1935 and seen at first hand what the Nazi pogroms were like. He spoke German and French and was familiar with the work of their living writers and painters. At that time, with anti-Semitism running high in America, his first move was to visit Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House, soliciting her support. The first lady promised to help, but to judge by the behaviour of the State Department subsequently, her husband did not share her views. Fry arrived in Marseilles in August 1940 with $3,000 in his pocket and a list of two hundred names that he had memorised, judging it too dangerous to carry written lists. These names had been collected in an ad hoc way. Thomas Mann had provided the names of German writers at risk, Jacques Maritain a list of French writers, Jan Masaryk the Czechs. Alvin Johnson, president of the New School of Social Research, submitted names of academics, and Alfred Barr, director of MoMA, supplied the names of artists. To begin with, many of those Fry had been sent to help – especially the artists – didn’t want to leave. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc
Chagall, and Jacques Lipchitz all refused to emigrate (Chagall asked if there were ‘any cows’ in America). Amedeo Modigliani wanted to leave but wouldn’t do anything illegal. Fry’s offer was also turned down by Pablo Casals, André Gide, and André Malraux.
¹¹

Fry soon came to understand that not all the people on his list were in mortal danger. The Jews were, as well as the more outspoken, long-standing political opponents of Nazism. At the same time, it became clear that if many of the very famous, non-Jewish ‘degenerate’ artists were protected by their celebrity in Vichy France, there were far more lesser-known figures who
were
in real danger. Without referring back to New York, therefore, Fry changed the policy of the ERC and set about helping as many people as he could who fell within the ambit of the special visa law, whether they were on his list or not.
¹²
He installed the Centre Américain de Secours, a ‘front’ organisation on the rue Grignan in Marseilles, which dispensed routine aid to refugees – small amounts of money, help with documentation or in communicating with the United States. Meanwhile he set up his own clandestine network, using several members of the French underground, which transported selected refugees out of France into Portugal, where, with a visa, they could sail for America. He found a ‘safe house,’ the Villa Air Bel, just north of Marseilles, and there he equipped his refugees with false documents and local guides who could lead them via obscure and arduous pathways across the Pyrenees to freedom. The best-known figures who escaped in this dramatic fashion included André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (who had written a critical biography of Hitler), Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler-Werfel, André Masson, Franz Werfel, and the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam. In all, Fry helped around two thousand individuals, ten times the number he had been sent out to look for.
¹³