A New Beginning for the IfS in Postwar West Germany

In October 1946, representatives of the University of Frankfurt, the Hessian Ministry of Culture and Education, and the city of Frankfurt am Main approached Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), the director of the exiled Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS), asking him to return from New York/Los Angeles to re-establish his institute in Frankfurt (Drummer et al. 2009: 18). Though initially unenthusiastic regarding a return to Germany thus being forced to face former colleagues who had continued their academic careers under the Nazi regime (Kingreen 2009: 30), Horkheimer eventually agreed and re-opened in 1951 the IfS in Frankfurt with the assistance of Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) and the financial support from the McCloy Funds, the government of Hesse, the city of Frankfurt as well as private foundations.Footnote 1

The re-establishment of the IfS required cooperation with people who were important for the re-constitution of West German academia, such as American military officials, German education policymakers, sociologists who returned from exile, and scholars who had remained in Germany during the Nazi regime. Research literature on the history of sociology in postwar West Germany assumes that this cooperation was rooted in two goals shared by sociologists, politicians, and military officials: the education of the German population in democratic values (Weischer 2004: 70; Adamski 2009: 17) and the establishment of sociology as “democratization science” (cf. Guilhot 2007). Yet this literature largely neglects the various forms of cooperation Horkheimer and his colleagues conducted after their return to Frankfurt (cf. Boll and Gross 2009; Walter-Busch 2010; Wiggershaus 2008; Albrecht et al. 1999).

If cooperation is one important factor in the institute’s postwar history, competition is another. The so-called “setup-decennium” of sociology in West Germany from 1945 to the early 1960s was characterized by a strong competition among the several institutes of social research that participated in this process (Weischer 2004: 35–36; cf. Lepsius 1979). In a detailed book on the history of the IfS in West Germany, Alex Demirović (1999: 279–310, 352–353, 357–360, 368–372) treats this history as a story of competition and conflict between the IfS and other institutes of social research, emphasizing the critical-Marxist attitude of the IfS directors, particularly that of Adorno that distanced him from other sociologists.

This article argues that in successfully re-establishing the IfS in postwar West Germany and the subsequent development of the “Frankfurt School”—as Horkheimer and Adorno, with their critical theory of society, were labeled in the mid-1960s—cooperation and competition were equally important.Footnote 2 It ends with the positivism dispute in 1961, the controversy between Adorno and Jürgen Habermas (*1929) on one side and representatives of critical rationalism Karl R. Popper (1902–1994) and Hans Albert (*1921) on the other. My point is that this controversy was rooted in conflicts between West German sociologists that were suppressed by their cooperation in the early 1950s, but became more virulent through the increased competition in the late 1950s.

Horkheimer’s decision to return to Frankfurt in 1949 and to campaign for the democratization of West Germany was effected by the intellectual developments of the IfS in American exile. In the USA, the IfS developed expertise in empirical social research. Around 1940, Horkheimer started to cooperate with several American and émigré scholars on empirical projects concerning anti-Semitism in the USA. These scholars developed innovative empirical methods and research instruments, such as the “group method” and the F-Scale, a social-psychological index to measure authoritarian attitudes (Fleck 2007: 381–382; Ziege 2009: 48–49) that connected American opinion poll techniques and experimental psychology with the qualitative analytical approach of the IfS (Wiggershaus 2008: 463). Concurrent to the empirical projects, Horkheimer and Adorno investigated anti-Semitism and authoritarianism in theory resulting in the The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which they completed in 1944 and published in 1947. In this seminal work, the authors argue that the Enlightenment unleashed both, the emancipation and the self-destruction of the bourgeoisie (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947: 7). The self-destruction of bourgeois liberalism occurred through its perversion in fascism, a development that Horkheimer and Adorno observed in Europe and in the USA. Both the empirical and theoretical studies concluded that fascism was inherently connected with modernity, implying that every modern society had the potential to become fascist (Ziege 2009: 170–171; Horkheimer 1939). For Horkheimer and Adorno, fascist thinking and anti-Semitic attitudes were not idiosyncrasies of a certain nation, such as Germany, but rather the result of a psychological pathology stemming from the faulty development of modern society (Adorno 1973: 2–5, 9–10).

Despite some successes in the USA, there were good reasons for Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno to return to Frankfurt. First, it was unclear how the IfS could continue its work in New York, given that cooperation with the American Jewish Committee that predominantly financed the empirical research projects became more difficult in the mid-1940s (Wiggershaus 2013: 165–173). Second, the political situation during the McCarthy era with its Red-baiting and anti-communist witch hunts made work strenuous for leftist scholars (Adorno 1957a: 7). Third, Horkheimer and Adorno found little support there for their theoretical work, which American scholars dismissed as “metaphysical speculations” (Wheatland 2009: 81–85). And finally, the empirical projects on anti-Semitism proved that social knowledge was useful and applicable to actual problems, such as the latency of anti-Semitism in democracies, a problem confronting postwar West Germany.Footnote 3 Thus, the invitation to return to Frankfurt was a welcomed offer for these scholars to re-launch their academic careers as German professors and to re-establish the IfS with sufficient financial means.

Various forms of cooperation and competition interacted simultaneously in the process of re-establishing the IfS. For example, notwithstanding that Adorno and philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976) competed in placing their favorite scholars in sociology at German universities, they were on good terms with each other and cooperated in their intellectual endeavor to oppose mass and consumer culture. Such complex forms of cooperation and competition cannot be analyzed by examining the publications of the scholars and their published correspondence. This article draws instead on archival sources, particularly Adorno’s correspondence as co-director and later as director of the IfS; Adorno’s personal letters; and the correspondences between Horkheimer and educational politicians, American officials, and German professors. In addition, unpublished documents on empirical social research projects of the IfS conducted in the 1950s; sources on the policy of the American occupational forces in the Hessian Main State Archive; and documents of the Frankfurt University Archive will be examined.

This article analyzes several forms of cooperation between the IfS and others: (1) cooperation with German sociologists who continued their careers during the Nazi regime; (2) cooperation with academics at the University of Frankfurt; (3) cooperation with American officials and representatives of the Hessian Ministry of Culture and Education; (4) cooperation with returned émigré-sociologists in order to influence the development of sociology as a discipline; (5) cooperation with media representatives, such as directors of radio and TV programs and editors of intellectual journals. Competition included: (1) competition for the location of research institutes and their financial and political backing; (2) competition for financial resources and over the proper way to conduct empirical social research; (3) competition for interpretational sovereignty in sociology.

Forms of Cooperation in Postwar West German Sociology: Re-Establishing the IfS

Cooperation with German Sociologists

In 1950, not long before the IfS officially reopened its doors, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock began meeting with sociologists from the University of Frankfurt and other West German research institutes to adapt methods they had developed in the USA to explore the psychological structures of the West German population (Klingemann 2014: 491–492).Footnote 4 At one of these meetings, the directors of the IfS convened with Heinz Sauermann (1905–1981), an economist at the University of Frankfurt, Ludwig Neundörfer (1901–1975), the head of the Sociographic Institute in Frankfurt, and Gerhard Wurzbacher (1912–1999), a professor of sociology in Kiel, to discuss developing a method for interviewing Germans that would guarantee the highest degree of honest responses. Given the Nazi past of many of the prospective interviewees, Horkheimer argued that they should be interviewed in “as natural as possible” a surrounding. Sauermann agreed, maintaining that only in an atmosphere of discussion people could be induced to reveal their true opinions on matters such as their relationship to the Soviets, the Americans, Hitler, or the Jews—something that would not be achieved by interviewing them.Footnote 5 In addressing this problem, the scholars created a basic stimulus that would provoke discussions among the groups of interviewees. This stimulus was conceived as a bogus letter from an American officer named “Colburn” that included both positive and negative stereotypical attitudes towards the Germans. The IfS used the “Colburn letter” for its first large research project in Frankfurt, the Gruppenexperiment (Group Experiment) (Klingemann 2014: 491–492).Footnote 6

The fact that Sauermann, Neundörfer, and Wurzbacher were experts of empirical social research sheds light on the development of sociology during the Nazi era. The Nazi regime represented a period of both “empiricization” and völkisch and racial ideologization of German sociology. Sociologists sought to provide advice for solving völkisch problems, which promoted the political and economic application of sociological knowledge. Settlement of urban and rural areas, agrarian politics, and housing were the major topics for sociologists during the Nazi regime, because expertise in these fields was vital for the völkisch re-structuring of Europe, as executed by the SS following the launching of World War II (Klingemann 2008: 417–423). Both Sauermann and Neundörfer had worked for Nazi organizations. While Sauermann wrote articles for the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung (Reich Institute for Spatial Planning) and the Reichsstelle für Raumordnung (Reich Office for Area Planning), Neundörfer had toiled in the service of Heinrich Himmler’s settlement policy (Klingemann 1989: 118–124; Klingemann 2009: 19–21). Wurzbacher taught at Adolf-Hitler-Schools and cooperated with the same institutions as Sauermann and Neundörfer (Klingemann 2009: 23, 99–101). All three specialists produced the same sort of research after 1945 as they did under Nazi rule, with the difference that post-1945 this research was applied for democratizing the West German population.

German sociologists not only generated empirical knowledge during the Nazi regime, they also learned about American research methods. One example is social researcher and journalist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916–2010), co-founder of the Institute for Public Opinion Polls in Allensbach (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, IfD), founded in 1947. Noelle-Neumann had been to the USA from 1937 to 1938 as fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD), studying with opinion poll researcher George Gallup in Columbia, Missouri (Noelle-Neumann 2006: 55–64; Klingemann 2009: 19–22).

Empirical social research, however, had already being conducted in Germany before 1933. Governmental statistics was one important branch of social research before the Nazi era (Adamski 2009: 134). Max Weber (1864–1920) planned a multi-methodological project in 1909/1910 on the press (Hepp 2004: 31–34). Theodor Geiger (1891–1952) in Braunschweig carried out opinion surveys in the 1920s, using questionnaires to investigate the social stratification of the German population (Geiger 1932). Both, the IfS in Frankfurt and Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) in Vienna had investigated the ideological attitudes of blue- and white-collar workers as well as the unemployed prior to their emigration to the USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s, (Lazarsfeld et al. 1933). Applied experimental and social psychology, such as investigations of school children, were fields of empirical research in Germany around 1900 further developed in the 1920s by applying US methods (Geisthövel 2013: 129–143). Particularly new in postwar West Germany were quantitative analyses based on random and quota samples, like the ones developed in the 1930s by social researchers such as Gallup or Lazarsfeld (Weischer 2004: 12–13). The same applied for experimental group discussions, as conducted in Kurt Lewin’s (1890–1947) Research Center for Group Dynamics (Moreno 1953) and employed by the IfS for its empirical projects on anti-Semitism. Most of these approaches originated in Europe and had been transferred to the USA by sociologists and psychologists, such as Lazarsfeld, Lewin, and Horkheimer (Ash 2010: 26–28).

Empirical knowledge was required in the postwar era to meet two major challenges, the planning of cities and housing, and the integration of the 12–14 million German refugees. In August 1946 the Hessian State Ministry decided to set up a commission comprised of members of Hessian universities, administrative officials, and planners so as to tackle these problems.Footnote 7 In 1953 the IfS carried out a project concerning the social climate in the urban and rural districts of Hesse, financed by the Office of Regional Planning in Hesse, the aim of which was to provide statistical and quantitative knowledge for a settlement and economic policy to ameliorate social problems in the region. In another project concerning retired persons in Hesse, conducted between 1952 and 1954, researchers of the IfS cooperated with Neundörfer’s Sociographic Institute.Footnote 8

Horkheimer’s claim in 1950 that he wanted to introduce the newest empirical methods of the modern American social sciences to West Germany and Adorno’s statement that empirical social research was underrepresented in postwar Germany (Adorno 1952) did not so much concern techniques and research instruments as the close connection between American social research and democratic education, advocated by US social psychologists and pragmatists, such as John Dewey (1859–1952) and Kurt Lewin (Ash 1998: 271–273; Ash 2010: 27; Westbrook 1991: xv, 319–373). The idea that empirical social research served democratic education was the guiding principle of the Group Experiment, carried out between 1950 and 1951 and largely financed by the US High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG).Footnote 9 Its goal was to examine the attitudes of Germans towards the Nazi regime, the occupying powers, and democracy. Such projects required a team of at least 15–20 trained statisticians and social researchers. Adorno acted as conceptual adviser of the empirical work and represented the IfS in public, while Pollock served as the executive director of the project.Footnote 10

Although Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno had experienced the practice of empirical research in the USA, they were not professionally trained in statistics and quantitative social research. For this reason, the IfS recruited Diedrich Osmer in 1951 and several other research assistants to carry out the fieldwork. In this context, the IfS also had to cooperate with institutes of opinion and marketing research, such as the IfD. Ludwig von Friedeburg (1924–2010), who became an assistant of Adorno and later served as director of empirical research at the IfS, was trained in empirical methods at the IfD. Such institutes—another example is the Office of Social Research in Dortmund (Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund, SFS, see Adamski 2009: 128)—regrouped several sociologists who had been die-hard Nazis or had worked for Nazi organizations. The IfS and the IfD cooperated in a planned project for the Office of the Federal Chancellor in 1953/54, with the aim to recruit officials for a new West German army.Footnote 11 As early as 1950, Adorno was appointed scientific director of the Darmstadt-Studie (Darmstadt Study, or Darmstadt Community Survey), carried out between 1949 and 1952 and led from 1950 to 1952 by Adorno and Max Rolfes (1894–1981) (Arnold 2010: 189–199). Rolfes was a former scientific adviser to Heinrich Himmler, who had been conducting research in Alsace and Lorraine for Himmler’s settlement politics during the early 1940s (Arnold 2010: 19; Klingemann 2009: 21). This cooperation reflected Horkheimer’s intention to work with young scholars and students who, according to Horkheimer, had to collaborate with Nazi organizations if they wanted to pursue a career in the Nazi regime (Demirović 1999: 115).

This cooperation was also based on shared political sentiments, such as “anti-totalitarianism.” The concept of anti-totalitarianism was congruent with the Western liberal ideology of freedom and democracy and was directed against both Nazism and communism (Muller 1987: 364–365). Each camp of sociologists developed its own version of anti-totalitarianism. Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno considered the totalitarian element to be latent in every modern society, whether fascist, communist, or capitalist. During their exile, the Frankfurt émigrés distanced themselves from Marxist approaches and developed a profound critique of every political system that oppressed individual freedom, such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Albrecht et al. 1999: 109–111). At the same time, German scholars who had stayed in Germany during the Nazi regime exchanged their anti-Bolshevist views for anti-totalitarian attitudes, opposing the Soviet communist state and welcoming Western democracy (Muller 1987: 331–335).

One example for this transformation is the sociologist Helmut Schelsky (1912–1984), a former member of the SA, NSDAP, and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association, former department head of the National Socialist German Students’ League in Leipzig, and a fervent anti-Bolshevist (Schäfer 2014: 210).Footnote 12 After 1945, Schelsky switched sides and wrote articles for the Social Democratic journal Volk und Zeit (Schäfer 2015: 11). The conversion of his anti-Bolshevism into anti-totalitarianism was made quite easy by Kurt Schumacher (1895–1952), president of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), who announced the party’s anti-communist and anti-Soviet program on 6 May 1945 (Potthoff and Miller 2003: 175–190). In 1949, Schelsky became professor at the Akademie für Gemeinwirtschaft (Academy for Public Enterprise) in Hamburg and started directing empirical research projects in sociology (Borries-Pausback 2002: 9–10, 45). Schelsky and his assistant Wurzbacher met Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno on several occasions in Frankfurt, when the IfS directors invited them to conferences and workshops to exchange ideas, research results, and methods.Footnote 13 In the early 1950s, Schelsky campaigned for the international cooperation of sociologists conducting empirical research projects to re-integrate German sociology into the international sociological community and to cover his Nazi past.Footnote 14

How much did Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno know about the Nazi past of their research partners? According to The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, published in 1947, the Holocaust was the radical outcome of a technocratized modern world. For Horkheimer, the transmogrification of scientific reason into “instrumental reason” was responsible for the atrocities of modernity (Horkheimer 2007: 74). However, there is no evidence in Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s oeuvres that the two authors reflected on the fact that they cooperated with the very technocrats they fervently criticized as representatives of “instrumental reason.” Two reasons may be adduced for that. First, Horkheimer and Adorno only criticized technocratic thinkers on a theoretical-philosophical level. Second, given that the development of modern capitalist society had gone awry from its very beginning in the bourgeois era, ending in fascism, it did not matter with whom Horkheimer and Adorno cooperated, because the majority of German sociologists were representatives of “instrumental reason” and were in one way or another guilty of having participated in the Nazi regime. Accusing individuals was not their aim. Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia (1951) that he did not “wish to be an executioner or to supply legitimations for executioners” and that he “would not wish, at least of all with legal machinery, to stay the hand of anyone who was avenging past misdeeds” (Adorno 1951: 61–62).Footnote 15 This position did not remain unchallenged. Fellow émigré Günther Anders (1902–1992), who had been living in Vienna since 1950, sent Adorno a letter in August 1963 in which he asked how Adorno could have concluded a Burgfrieden (party truce) with erstwhile Nazis like Gehlen.Footnote 16 Adorno replied that Gehlen’s case was ambiguous and that he did not intend to defame Gehlen because of his role in the Nazi regime. “It is quite indifferent to me with whom I shake hands, as long as nothing of this remains sticking to the paper upon which I write,” he wrote.Footnote 17

Cooperation with Professors at the University of Frankfurt

Horkheimer received a professorship in July 1949 and was shortly thereafter elected dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, and subsequently rector of the university. Pollock was appointed applied professor in 1951 and a full chair in 1958 (Walter-Busch 2010: 34–35; Wiggershaus 2008: 479). Adorno became an extracurricular applied professor in 1950, a curricular applied professor in 1953, and was finally appointed a full chair in 1957 (Wiggershaus 2006: 138). As university professors, Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno had to work closely together with German professors who had collaborated with Nazi organizations and been allowed to continue their careers after 1945—in faculty meetings, on commissions deciding the appointment of future professors, or on degree boards passing dissertations and post-doctoral qualifications. For example, one of the members of the board of the foundation Institute of Social Research, which acted as the legal representative of the IfS, was Horkheimer’s predecessor as university rector, Boris Rajewsky (1893–1974), a former Oberscharführer (technical sergeant) in the SA and member of the NSDAP (Schwerin 2013: 293).Footnote 18 As university rector in the years 1949/50 and 1951/52, Rajewsky’s support was essential for the re-establishment of the IfS. When Horkheimer read an article in the German-Jewish émigré journal Der Aufbau accusing Rajewsky of being a “Belarusian fascist,” Horkheimer replied critically and called Rajewsky his “friend” (Boll 2013: 360).

Horkheimer and Adorno wanted to establish those scholars whose dissertations and habilitations they supervised. Therefore it was important to pass the candidates through the dissertation and habilitation boards, which required the general agreement of the board. And vice versa, the other professors of the faculty of philosophy and the faculty of social sciences likewise needed Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s agreement in order to pass their favorite candidates through examination. For example, historian of antiquity Matthias Gelzer (1886–1974), a former member of the völkisch organization Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA, Association for the German Culture in Foreign Countries) and Sustaining Member of the SS (Förderndes Mitglied der SS),Footnote 19 asked Adorno in July 1959 for his opinion on a book by an art historian named Gollub, whom Gelzer wanted to recommend as fellow of the German Research Foundation. Adorno answered that “of course, it is not for me to evaluate the historical reliability of the book by Gollub—your positive vote makes any discussion about this aspect needless.” Adorno argued, though, that the book was not scientific enough and was too much geared to the popular book market.Footnote 20 Gelzer agreed: “I absolutely understand your argument, because, from the perspective of my discipline, I can not approve the book as scientific achievement either.”Footnote 21 Horkheimer and Adorno were aware of Gelzer’s past and his politics in faculty meetings. In 1957, Adorno reported to Horkheimer, who was in the USA at this time, that Gelzer tried to push the employment as professor of one of his favorite candidates. According to Adorno, Gelzer had taken advantage of Horkheimer’s absence. Even though Adorno tried to argue against Gelzer at the meeting, he feared that the majority of the faculty was on Gelzer’s side.Footnote 22

There were occasions when the board decisions concerning the appointment of future professors ended in conflict. In the early 1950s, the faculty debated several cases of Wiedergutmachung (compensation) regarding dissertations, post-doctoral qualifications, and chairs that had been revoked by the Nazis after 1933.Footnote 23 One of these cases was Adorno’s professorship for philosophy and sociology. When the faculty debated Adorno’s case, Hellmut Ritter (1892–1971), a returned émigré and professor for oriental studies, argued that Adorno’s Minima Moralia would have a bad influence on the students.Footnote 24 In May 1956, Horkheimer forwarded the proposal to convert Adorno’s professorship into a full chair, a move that was supported by the majority of the faculty members.Footnote 25 During a meeting of the board, in which Horkheimer and Ritter discussed Adorno’s professorship, Ritter was very critical of the way that Adorno’s case was handled. He accused Horkheimer of favoritism and, according to another member of the faculty, suggested: “If someone wanted to caricature and exaggerate things, one could say that all it needed to make a career in Frankfurt was being a Jew.” In response to that Horkheimer rose shouting, “Mr. Ritter, if you are an anti-Semite, you should at least shut up here,” and stormed from the room. The dean of the faculty of philosophy tried to calm down Horkheimer, assuring him that he did not agree with Ritter.Footnote 26 After this incident, Horkheimer submitted his request for retirement, claiming that he could not continue to work in Frankfurt in the face of such “anti-Semitic attacks against him.” Since this was a huge scandal in the faculty, it was not to be made public. The dean sent Ritter a letter requesting him to apologize to Horkheimer and Adorno, and Ritter acquiesced.Footnote 27 The dean then assured Horkheimer that the faculty was shocked by the incident and implored Horkheimer to withdraw his request for retirement. Appeased and honored, Horkheimer did so, while Ritter was placed on probation.Footnote 28 This case illustrates the standing and impact Horkheimer had on his colleagues.

Cooperation with American Officials and Hessian Educational Politicians

During World War II, members of the IfS in exile Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Franz Neumann (1900–1954), Otto Kirchheimer (1905–1965), and Friedrich Pollock worked for US intelligence offices, in particular for the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. They wrote secret reports on Nazi Germany in order to provide sociological, political, and historical knowledge for the US military and the future allied occupation of Germany (Müller 2010). This research provided Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno with information about what to expect in West Germany after the war; in particular concerning scholars who collaborated with Nazi organizations or were intransigent Nazis (Laudani 2013: 14–15, 22). The relationships established in the USA between the IfS and American scholars and education politicians were important for the successful re-establishment of the IfS in postwar West Germany. Horkheimer’s contacts with influential American and émigré-scholars, educational politicians, and political advisers who worked for the Office of Military Government of the US Army (OMGUS) or HICOG, such as Shepard Stone (1908–1990) of the Ford Foundation, Fritz Bauer (1903–1968), and Fritz Karsen (1885–1951), who was Chief of the Higher Education and Teacher Training in the Office of Education and Cultural Relations at OMGUS from 1946 to 1948, showed the Germans that the IfS was an important institution offering scientific expertise for the democratization of West Germany (Claussen 2013).Footnote 29 German education politicians believed that the IfS facilitated the Westbindung (the alliance with the US-led West) that they sought to establish. Hence it is not surprising that Frankfurt was the first university in West Germany to establish a transatlantic exchange program for professors with the University of Chicago in 1948 (Wheatland 2009: 272–274). Horkheimer, who had been appointed visiting professor at Chicago, was a driving force in the creation of this program.

Lawyer Hellmut Becker (1913–1993), son of the Prussian Education Minister in the Weimar Republic Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) and later founder of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, played a significant role in connecting Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno with influential German educational and cultural politicians after 1950. Though a former member of the NSDAP, Becker became one of the most influential persons in West Germany, with an extensive network of West German cultural and educational politicians, professors, and intellectuals (Raulff 2010: 25, 383, 385–400, 403–409, 457–458, 470–477, 481–496; Wiggershaus 2013: 190). By the late 1940s, Becker had contacts with the military government of Hesse as an expert in education and influenced the employment of rectors, deans, and professors at the University of Frankfurt.Footnote 30 Becker proved to be absolutely loyal to the IfS as a lawyer and adviser, attending almost every meeting with potential clients and linking Horkheimer and Adorno to industrialists and politicians, especially in education.Footnote 31 The education of teachers was particularly important for the IfS because Hesse, like other regions in Germany, suffered from a shortage of teachers, who were considered to be the most important social group for the democratization of West Germany (Albrecht et al. 1999: 131).

Horkheimer cultivated good personal contacts with Arno Hennig (1897–1963), the Hessian minister of culture and education. In December 1954 he thanked Hennig for the “friendly and encouraging words you sent me on the occasion of my return from the USA.”Footnote 32 Horkheimer stated, what had endeared him to the work in Frankfurt was “not least the fact that people of high profile […] defend the same ideals to which I am committed myself.” He thanked Hennig and the assistant head of the department Dr. Helene von Bila (1904–1985) for providing him with support and understanding for his task.Footnote 33 Bila was head of the department for higher education in the ministry and served under the Social Democratic ministers Ludwig Metzger (1902–1993), Hennig, and Ernst Schütte (1904–1972) from 1952 to 1969. Bila participated in several meetings of the IfS directors and representatives of industry and governmental administration, and took great interest in the research projects of the IfS. She was also on the foundation board of the IfS.Footnote 34

Horkheimer and the IfS received strong backing from Hessian cultural and educational policymakers. In 1953, they managed to establish the Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Journal of Social Research) and get more funding for the IfS from the Ministry of Education. Horkheimer also managed to establish the professorship for Adorno with the help of Hessian educational officialsFootnote 35 and tried to steer the appointment of rectors and professors at the University of Frankfurt. Thus Horkheimer, for instance, induced the appointment of dermatologist Oscar Gans (1888–1983), a Jewish émigré who returned to Frankfurt in 1946, as his successor as rector in 1953.Footnote 36

Cooperation with Émigré Sociologists Concerning Disciplinary Politics

The German Society of Sociology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, DGS), founded in 1909 and on hiatus since 1934, was re-founded in 1946 with US support. From 1946 to 1955, Leopold von Wiese (1876–1969) served as president of the Society (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 446). Wiese wanted to include sociologists in the newly founded DGS who, in his view, were not responsible for the Society’s demolition in 1934. Most of the well-known Nazis in sociology, such as Max Hildebert Boehm (1891–1968) or Franz Wilhelm Jerusalem (1883–1970), a fervent anti-Semite, were denied membership (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 461). Yet, other former anti-Semites and advocates of völkisch-racial thoughts, such as Karl Valentin Müller (1896–1963) and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann (1904–1988), were admitted (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 462). The sociologists excluded by Wiese organized themselves in the re-founded Institut International de Sociologie (International Institute of Sociology, IIS) under the guidance of Italian fascist Corrado Gini (1884–1965), which was affiliated with the International Sociological Association (ISA). In April 1951, a German section of the IIS was founded, consisting of Boehm, Gunther Ipsen (1899–1984), Carl Brinkmann (1885–1954), and Hans Freyer (1887–1969). Wiese treated this group of German sociologists with mistrust, but could not intervene due to the fact that the DGS was a member of the ISA (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 462–463).

Upon their return to Frankfurt, Horkheimer and Adorno became members of the newly founded DGS (Wiggershaus 2008: 437). They closely cooperated with Wiese, who was invited as guest professor to the University of Frankfurt by the IfS in 1953 and 1958.Footnote 37 With appointing Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) as new president of the DGS in 1955 the DGS had added another remigrant to its board, alongside Charlotte Lütkens (1896–1967), Horkheimer, and René König (1906–1992). Yet they had to cooperate with sociologists who had collaborated with Nazi organizations, such as Schelsky, Elisabeth Pfeil (1901–1975), and Mühlmann (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 462). Since the mid-1950s, remigrants cooperated more closely to prevent ex-Nazis from attaining powerful positions in the DGS. This cooperation mainly played out between Plessner, König, and Adorno (Demirović 1999: 412–413, 741–743, 777–778, 811–812).

In late 1957, the group of ex-Nazi sociologists surrounding Gini, planned a congress in Nuremberg, which was to rival the German Day of Sociology, the annual conference of the DGS (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 464–465). Plessner, König, and Adorno decided to go public with this.Footnote 38 Adorno convinced the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to publish a short article written by Plessner titled “Sociologists distance themselves,” in which Plessner discredited Gini and Müller.Footnote 39 As a result, many sociologists cancelled their participation in the Nuremberg congress. In 1959 Müller, who was also a member of the DGS, tried to take measures against this—supposed—defamation at the general assembly of the DGS, but failed in doing so. Because of that, Schelsky resigned his administrative duties with the DGS in protest (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 465–466).

Another example for this cooperation is that in late 1958 Plessner asked Adorno’s advice in choosing his successor as DGS president. According to Plessner, though Schelsky’s competence was out of question “his election would mean that his friend and teacher Gehlen would very soon gain influence in the society,”Footnote 40 Preventing Schelsky and Gehlen from gaining more influence was a goal shared by the émigré-sociologists. In the end, they assigned Otto Stammer (1900–1978) as president of the DGS from 1959 to 1963. Stammer, professor for political sociology in Berlin, too had lost his job after the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 466). Adorno and Horkheimer also prevented the appointment of Gehlen as professor at the University of Heidelberg in 1958 (Albrecht et al. 1999: 167).Footnote 41

Cooperation with Media Representatives

Horkheimer and Adorno appeared on radio broadcasts and TV shows, gave lectures at universities and adult education centers, and wrote articles for newspapers and intellectual magazines, thus promoting their reputation as democratic intellectuals in West Germany. Cooperation with media representatives, particularly with those who were persecuted under the Nazis, was most important for this public work. Leftists Alfred Andersch (1914–1980) from the South German Broadcasting and Walter Dirks (1901–1991), editor of the Frankfurter Monatshefte, were two of the most relevant media representatives. In 1956, Dirks became director of the culture program of the West German Broadcasting (Boll 2004: 176) and proved to be a successful popularizer of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s writings. He also participated in the work of the IfS, editing the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie (Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology) series with Adorno.Footnote 42 Andersch invited Adorno on several occasions to speak in his evening program on South German Radio.Footnote 43 In the 1950s and 1960s, Adorno contributed to a vast number of radio broadcasts not only for almost every West German radio station, but also for Swiss and British radio programs (Schwarz 2011: 292).Footnote 44 Suhrkamp Press and its directors Peter Suhrkamp (1891–1959), with whom Adorno had maintained contact since 1950,Footnote 45 and Siegfried Unseld (1924–2002) (Schopf 2003) were important in making Adorno’s books known among the German intellectual public.

Radio broadcasts and TV shows also served in demonstrating confrontation and controversy between intellectuals. For Adorno, harmony was not fruitful. On the contrary, he felt that intellectuals should debate important philosophical questions in public (Schwarz 2011: 293). Bearing that in mind, Adorno publicly crossed swords with Gehlen. In several radio broadcasts and a TV show in 1965, Adorno and Gehlen debated the role of the public in society and discussed topics such as “freedom and institution.” These debates were anything but spontaneous. Adorno and Gehlen, who were friends in private, coordinated their controversies. The broadcasts and shows were rather showcasing critical discussion culture than outbursts of long-running debates.Footnote 46

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s radio and TV performances were dedicated to the emancipation of the individual, to a non-conformist philosophy, a profound critique of American, Soviet, and German culture, and a reflection on the German Nazi past. In the late 1950s, Adorno promoted the slogan “working through the past” to challenge the politics of the past that so many West Germans advocated. This coming to terms with the past, widespread in particular among conservative West German politicians, entailed the relegation of Nazi followers and the condemnation of only a small elite of high-ranking Nazis, thus aiming to forge the alliance with the US-led West (Frei 2012). Adorno’s lecture “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“The meaning of working through the past”), first held at a meeting of the Coordination Committee for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in 1959 and broadcast by Hessian Radio in February 1960, was the crucial text for this self-reflection (Adorno 1970: 10–28).

Forms of Competition and the Emergence of the “Frankfurt School”

Competition For The Location of Research Institutions

Horkheimer and König competed for the location of the UNESCO Institute of Social Research, which was finally established in Cologne, where König taught (Albrecht et al. 1999: 154; Demirović 1999: 313–320, 324–326). In July 1948 Horkheimer participated in an UNESCO conference in Paris and established contacts with representatives of this organization. The UNESCO wanted to establish US empirical research in West Germany to counter certain ideologies in Europe, particularly communism. John W. Thompson, the representative of UNESCO in Germany, offered Horkheimer sponsorship for his institute (Demirović 1999: 311), after which Horkheimer and Adorno drafted several memoranda in which they formulated ideas for future empirical research projects.Footnote 47 Thompson was enthusiastic about the propositions made by the IfS, and Horkheimer thought he could integrate the IfS into the new institute, of which he would become director (Demirović 1999: 312).

But the decision about the location of the UNESCO institute—whether in Frankfurt, Cologne, or Hamburg—was delayed. In February 1951, an expert committee of the German section for UNESCO projects was created, consisting of Otto Neuloh (1902–1993) of the SFS and Schelsky, among others, and led by Walter Erbe (1909–1967), whom Horkheimer considered an “enemy” (Demirović 1999: 313–314). Horkheimer wrote to the Hessian Ministry of Culture and Education that he would defend the claim that the UNESCO institute should be located in Frankfurt,Footnote 48 but in the end UNESCO decided on Cologne (Demirović 1999: 325–326). According to Horkheimer and Adorno, König strongly advocated the Cologne location, and with the assistance of Louis Wirth (1897–1952), representative of the International Social Science Association, he wrote a letter to Paris discrediting the IfS (Demirović 1999: 315). The veracity of König’s claim cannot be verified, but for Horkheimer and Adorno, the bottom line was that König competed with them for the UNESCO institute with the backing of powerful supporters. According to the Frankfurters, this intrigue was the result of a “neo-fascist” conspiracy consisting in particular of Schelsky and Neuloh, who wanted to repress the influence of remigrants in West German sociology (Demirović 1999: 316).

Competition for Financial Resources and the Right Way to Conduct Empirical Research

The several institutes of social research that emerged in West Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s competed for financial resources because they were predominantly privately funded. Major players in this competition were the IfS, König, Schelsky, Noelle-Neumann, the SFS, and Stammer. An important reason for the increased competition between the IfS and the other institutes was HICOG’s withdrawal of financial support for research projects in 1953, after which the IfS had to develop empirical projects that would be financed by industry or governmental agencies (Platz 2012: 370). This was the primary reason for employing Ludwig von Friedeburg, who came to the IfS in 1954, and the statistician Rudolf Gunzert (1906–1981), who came in 1957, first as department head of empirical research and in 1959 as second director of the IfS.Footnote 49

One example for this industry-funded research was the Study of Working Climate (Betriebsklima-Studie) in 1954/55 on behalf of the Mannesmann holding, a steel corporation in the Ruhr area. The aim of this project was to explore the mindsets of white- and blue-collar workers of several Mannesmann industrial works (Platz 2012: 310). For this research, the institute applied a general survey, using questionnaires and group discussions to record the deeper psychological motivations of the workers (Betriebsklima 1955: 12). Thirty interviewers, partly from the IfS and the Institute for Population Survey (Institut für Volksumfragen, DIVO) in Frankfurt, conducted the field research (Platz 2012: 320, 323, 332). The investigation concluded that in general the Mannesmann employees were not interested in workplace politics and alienated from their work environment. The Mannesmann sponsors, however, denied Adorno and his co-workers permission to publish the results because they did not want the public to become aware of the workers’ negative approach to their workplaces (Platz 2012: 333). As a result, almost all the qualitative and critical parts of the group discussions were cut in the final monograph (Platz 2012: 367–370).

Due to the fact that Adorno and his research team analyzed the social situation of West German workers with a critical eye, the empirical research of the IfS was rather distinctive compared to other industrial sociological projects conducted by the SFS or Schelsky. In Adorno’s view, empirical knowledge should contribute to a critical revision of the debased conditions of West German society. The SFS and Schelsky, in contrast, produced knowledge aimed at the further development of industrial works in a technocratic sense. A study on the housing situation of mine workers in the Ruhr area, conducted by Ipsen, Heinrich Popitz (1925–2002), and Pfeil of the SFS in the early 1950s, clearly shows that a critical analysis of the mine workers’ awareness or capitalist society was not the aim. The researchers rather investigated workers’ housing problems in order to improve their housing situation and make them more functional for West German society (Ipsen et al. 1954: 79, 108–109). Such studies stood in the tradition of intellectual and scientific expertise underpinning the social status quo (Schäfer 2015: 5). Another example for this kind of study was the research conducted by the IfD. Noelle-Neumann used the techniques of opinion research to determine the socio-psychological bases of “mass opinion” in order to offer this knowledge to politicians and industrialists (Noelle 1963: 22–31). Horkheimer and Adorno considered Noelle-Neumann’s approach an abuse of scientific methods; they accused her of generating a biased public opinion by investigating only certain aspects of the German population’s needs. For the Frankfurters, such empirical research techniques reproduced the status quo of society, that is, the dominance of the ruling classes and of capitalism. Preventing this required applying a critical philosophical perspective (Horkheimer and Adorno 2008: 272–273). The fact that Noelle-Neumann predominantly cooperated with Christian-conservative politicians which confirmed the allegations of the Frankfurters. Unlike the IfS, Noelle-Neumann and her colleagues in the IfD considered public opinion polling an opportunity for politicians, the media, and industry to learn more about the hidden needs of the population, and improve society accordingly (Noelle-Neumann and Schmidtchen 1963).

Adorno increasingly distanced himself from empirical research. On the 1st of March 1957, Adorno, Friedeburg, Habermas, Gunzert, Noelle-Neumann, Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009), Hans-Joachim Lieber (1923–2012), Popitz, and Stammer debated their different approaches towards the value of empirical knowledge at a meeting.Footnote 50 According to Adorno, true empirical knowledge could only be gained by an analysis of society as a whole; without a critical attitude towards society, empirical research would substantiate the status quo (Adorno 1957b: 216).Footnote 51 In contrast, Noelle-Neumann’s and Dahrendorf’s models claimed the use of social knowledge for the functional improvement of society, a perspective based on logical-rationalist assumptions in the tradition of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Noelle-Neumann claimed that if Adorno’s theoretical viewpoints were not proven by empirical research, they merely represented opinions, far removed from social reality.Footnote 52

Competition for Interpretational Sovereignty

The methodological competitions in West German sociology were closely connected to the opposing political positions of the sociologists involved. This also applied to competitions for interpretational sovereignty of the political discourses in contemporary society. There were three reasons for this competition: first, due to its proximity to politics and industry sociology was highly politicized. In the 1950s, when sociology in West Germany was still in the process of being consolidated, German sociologists disputed which kind of sociology was to be representative for West Germany: critical study of society or functional support of the state (Guilhot 2007: 453). Second, postwar West German sociology was marked by competitions and conflicts between scholars, who had actively taken part in the Nazi regime, and remigrants, who had lost their work and livelihood in 1933 due to that regime. These controversies increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Third, sociologists in West Germany were concerned with the question of how to deal with the Nazi past, either leaving the past behind and looking forward or working through the past. This issue was probably the most problematic one, since the one group of scholars was scarred by the Nazi regime, whereas the other group consisted of scholars who were in one way or another involved in Nazi politics.

The cooperation between Adorno, Plessner, and König in terms of the politics of the DGS resulted in competition with German sociologists—and Schelsky in particular—who had already tried to diminish Horkheimer’s influence on UNESCO policies around 1950. In 1955, Adorno and Heinz Maus (1911–1978), Horkheimer’s first assistant in postwar West Germany, agreed that the influence Schelsky’s on West German sociology had to be stifled. Yet Adorno wanted to avoid an open confrontation with Schelsky, as he wrote to Maus, given that Schelsky was “a very smart man.”Footnote 53 Adorno and Maus were well aware of the things Schelsky had written during the National Socialist era. Since Maus worked on an article on the history of German sociologists under Hitler, he was up to date with the writings of scholars such as Schelsky, Freyer, Müller, or Karl Heinz Pfeffer (1906–1971).Footnote 54 Maus published his article in 1959 in König’s Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychology, the same year that the DGS celebrated its 50th anniversary at the German Day for Sociology in Berlin (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 463–464).

The late 1950s and early 1960s brought changes in dealing with the Nazi past in West German sociology. The aforementioned debate between Adorno, Plessner, König and the sociologists of the IIS around Gini and Müller in 1957/59 was the first open conflict between these groups of sociologists. In 1962, König protested vigorously against Pfeffer’s appointment at the University of Münster and demanded that the DGS delivered a public statement concerning this case. König attacked Pfeffer by circulating a dossier including some passages of Pfeffer’s writings from the 1930s. In another incident in 1963, an Israeli author accused Mühlmann of recommending to his students writings from the 1930s and 1940s that included anti-Semitic passages. Mühlmann’s reaction published in the German newspaper Die Zeit was partly anti-Semitic, and resulted in making him ineligible for the presidency of the DGS. Instead, Adorno became Stammer’s successor (Borggräfe and Schnitzler 2014: 466–467).

This was the context in which the positivism dispute evolved, the debate about sociological epistemology between Adorno and critical rationalist Karl Popper and, later, between Habermas and Hans Albert. In October 1961 Dahrendorf invited Popper and Adorno to a DGS workshop on the topic “The Logic of Social Sciences” (Ritsert 2010: 102). Adorno had been asked to comment on Popper’s twenty-seven theses on the logic of the social sciences. But instead of critically discussing Popper’s theses, Adorno formulated his own epistemology of sociology (Frisby 2004: 254). He opposed the philosophical and sociological approaches with which he was confronted during the Weimar Republic, American exile, and postwar West Germany, ranging from Karl Mannheim’s relational sociology via the logical empiricists of the Vienna circle to American pragmatism, “technocratic” systems theory, behaviorism, and critical rationalism, as Popper represented it (Dahms 1994: 337). Although this debate seemed to be exclusively academic, its political implications should not be neglected. The core of the debate was what kind of epistemology should direct sociology in the Western world in general, and in West Germany in particular: a “neutral” thesis-oriented and rationalist epistemology or a critical social philosophy that uncovered the faulty consciousness of society. Hence the positivism dispute was rather the demonstration of two opposing positions than a discussion. The contouring of Adorno’s position as critical theorist and the labeling of this approach as “Frankfurt School” during the 1960s originated in this debate (Albrecht et al. 1999: 176–184).

Consolidating Sociology in the Early Cold War and Its Fragmentation in the 1960s

Two factors were essential for the successful re-establishment of the IfS in early Cold War West Germany. First was the overall aim to democratize the West German people. Second, German sociologists, educational politicians, and the IfS provided resources for one another. While the former needed remigrated Jewish scholars to whitewash the problematic past of German academics and to establish the Westbindung, the latter considered the invitation a better opportunity than what they were offered in the USA. The various forms of cooperation, even though in many respects problematic for Horkheimer, Pollock, and Adorno, provided resources for the institutional and academic success for the IfS and resulted in the consolidation and broad institutionalization of sociology in the FRG. Parallel to this development ran competition between the various groups of sociologists in the 1950s. Besides profound epistemological and methodological differences, dealing with the German Nazi past and, particularly, with the Nazi past of German sociologists was decisive for the increased competition and potential for conflicts. After re-establishing the IfS successfully in the early 1950s, these competitions and conflicts, which culminated in the positivism dispute, contoured the label “Frankfurt School” as symbol for a critical theory of society.