Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (10 page)

Otto Albert’s class at the French Gymnasium, 1926. Otto Albert is on the top row, far left.

When Otto Albert stood for his
Abitur
(his final exam and thesis), on January 29, 1932, his assigned topic was an analysis of a quote from Spinoza: “One should neither laugh nor cry at the world, but understand it.” It was, in the scheme of things, a remarkably appropriate line for what would characterize a leitmotif of his own, much later, compositions. Written under exam conditions of a half day, the young man’s commentary summarized much of what Otto Albert had learned of Hegel, the tradition of German idealism, and Greek literature to treat the quote as a moral injunction for the present. As befitted the school’s aims of creating thoughtful young men for a cosmopolitan republic, the examiners
cared less about his command of Spinoza’s own writings (which the young Hirschmann had read but did not imbibe with quite the same determination reserved for Hegel) than the soon-to-be-graduate’s values he would carry forth into the world. The sixteen-year-old’s exam script ended with a plea for an open mind: “Finally, the maxim calls upon us not to mock or fight something at first sight, but to consider, to understand, to penetrate. It is thus directed against the increase of catchphrases. Against this state of affairs, in which—as Goethe put it—a conceptual lacuna is soon filled by a word, Spinoza’s maxim deserves to be defended as an ideal.”
¹

More important to Otto Albert’s educational experience than what transpired in the classroom was what the school offered on the side. It was in the quasi-formal reading groups, or tutorials (
Arbeitsgemeinschaften
), on topics ranging from art history to classical philology and led by faculty, alumni, and upperclassmen that Otto Albert thrived. The idea was to have the students create a parallel curriculum of their own design, one that would reflect their interests beyond the core of languages, humanities, math, and natural science. Otto Albert and his classmates reached out to a Collège Français alumnus, Bernd Knoop, who took Otto Albert under his wing for intensive reading of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
once a week over the course of one school year, 1931–32, culminating in the next summer’s writing assignment on one of the introductory paragraphs of Hegel’s monumental work, which focused on reason and consciousness. Otto Albert parked himself at a great desk in the Staatsbibliothek for weeks, poring over the text and writing his very first independent essay, a dense, twenty-eight-page exegesis. At the time, Hegel was the departure point for any serious student of contemporary German philosophy and social theory, and
Phenomenology
was the ur-text that any ambitious student had to master (or think he was mastering). In the dialectical escalation from spirit to consciousness to self-consciousness so much could be explained—and yet it was not easy; OA’s friend, Helmut Mühsam—the nephew of a famous anarchist—quipped: “I understand every word, but not their connection!”
²

Still, Hirschmann was determined to show his mettle and fathom the ties between Reason and History—and their surprising turns. He did so by
tackling a passage of
Phenomenology
dealing with Hegel’s concept of ethics and consciousness and how the two are grounded in the nation and in the family—and from which an “ethical order” for human reason emerges. As happens so often in analyses of Hegel’s work, the young Hirschmann’s prose is as dense as that he tried to decipher; indeed, it does not differ very much from the subject. One might suspect that he grappled with Hegel’s opacity by being opaque himself, an inclination that would change dramatically and yield to his trademark clairvoyance. But for a seventeen-year-old making his first steps into philosophy, not to mention Hegel, distance might be too much to ask. This exercise was already something of a tall order. But Hirschmann does offer some sense that he not only understood but also sought to lend an original reading to the great text when he dealt with Hegel’s understanding of the family. What was the “ethical” bedrock of the family? Not the husband and wife relationship, “which is clearly natural.” Nor was it the tie between parents and children, because “it does not display that identity between subject and object requisite for an ethical relationship.” The condition of an ethical relationship rested upon the exercise of free will, which required an exchange of “free individuality unto each other.” Accordingly, the ties that most conform to a “truly ethical relationship” are those between brothers and sisters, bound by blood but divided by sex. Hirschmann went on to explain how Hegel viewed brothers (for whom “spirit becomes individualized” as they move through the world, passing from subjects of divine law to human law) and sisters (who become wives and preservers of the home, and thus the preservers of the realm of divine law). It was the braided relationship between siblings that caught his eye and called for reflection. Sticking close to the Hegel text, he surmised that “in this way both sexes overcome their merely natural being, and become ethically significant, as diverse forms dividing between them the different aspects which the ethical substance assumes.” How much Hirschmann truly absorbed of this is hard to say. “At the time,” he recalled, “everything seemed very opaque to me.” Yet, one has a sense that his reference was not just
Phenomenology
, but also his dialectic with Ursula, with whom he was reconstituting a close bond (now as young adults) forged in the heat of the Weimar Republic’s decomposition.
³

He was enormously proud—of both the exercise in writing
and
of having tackled Hegel! That he had “something worthwhile” to say added to the sense of achievement. While it is tempting to identify in this writing on Hegel the seeds of something that would later grow—a sense that humans carried with them larger, logical, and ethical purposes inscribed in Reason and its manifestation in History—this impulse should be resisted. It is true that at the time he imagined himself as the heir of a German idealist tradition, but there is no sense that philosophy was capturing his imagination. Beyond this essay, Hirschmann would steer clear of Hegel until the 1970s, when he would stumble back to
Philosophy of Right
to wonder whether Marx had really revealed the cunning of capitalism’s history. In that subtle dig at the certainties of the social sciences, he used Hegel to turn excessively abstract theorizing on its head. Hegel, in fact, was a touchstone in his lifelong reservations about “the characteristic tardiness of theoretical understanding of reality.” These are Hirschmann’s words. And they are followed by Hegel’s hallowed metaphor about the Owl of Minerva who “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
⁴

For the moment, however, the commitment to study Hegel reflected a young man’s search for basic intellectual moorings for other interests and the belief that Hegel was a necessary departure point. It was more his developing interest in Marxism that cued his curiosity about dialectics; for any self-respecting dialectical thinker, one had to start with the source himself: the author of
Phenomenology
. This was, after all, Berlin, and Hegel was the city’s philosophical icon; any effort to acquire a Weltanschauung had to start here. At the time, there was not yet any recognition on Hirschmann’s part that there were various ways into the mysteries of
la raison universelle
, and it would take decades to circle back to Hegel to find in German idealism some foundations for his assault on “mindless theorizing.”

Hegel may have absorbed a lot of Hirschmann’s attention, but it was not the only reading group he joined. Johannes Strelitz introduced the students to Marx, and Heinrich Ehrmann, an influential mentor, guided the students through current socialist debates involving readings of Lenin, Kautsky, and the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Max Adler. Born in
1908, Heinrich (Henry) Ehrmann would go on to a career in political science at the University of Colorado, Dartmouth College, and McGill University, but at the time, he was an emerging socialist bright light. He had graduated from the Collège several years earlier, and from there went on to study law and political science at the University of Berlin, from which he graduated in 1929.

Books filled the young Hirschmann’s days, and his reading habits and tastes provide a backcloth to his life history. Shuffling around the house, he always had his nose in one. Often, he would detain a sister, or his father, to read a choice passage and end with an earnest, knowing invitation to share the pleasures of a well-turned phrase or a pithy insight. Between his father’s indulgence and his school’s orientations, he was not only well read in the classics, he devoured contemporary fiction like Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks
. Mann had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, not quite the headline news it is today, but it added to his allure, and this first novel, an epic about several generations of a bourgeois clan centering on self-sacrifice, delusions, and family decline, was often read as a metaphor for Germany’s own national narrative. Another favorite was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also meditated on religious and philosophical concerns through marriage, inheritance, and familial love triangles. Nietzsche enjoyed almost cult status among Otto Albert’s friends—a passion OA shared with his father. But it was, above all, history that he consumed: biographies and epics especially. One author stood above the rest: Emil Ludwig, the German-born journalist, who began his best-seller career in 1920 with a portrait of Goethe, followed by studies of Bismarck, Napoleon, Jesus, and others. What distinguished Ludwig’s books was the combination of historical fact, fictionalized filler, and psychological analysis, so that the drama did not just unfold in the outer world; history was about the internal experiences of great figures as well. Not surprisingly, in an age of Freud, Jung, and early existentialist writing, there was a turn inward, an exploration of the personal psychology of heroism, triumph, and tragedy. For young readers, gone was the allure of “selflessness,” of History with greatness built into it by the structures of the outside world. Echoes and elaborations on these obsessions could be seen outside the gymnasium in
the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement flourishing in music, photography, and architecture. It is unlikely that the younger readers of Hirschmann’s circle were au courant with these trends, but they were part of the more general turn away from outward stylistic embellishments of Romanticism and Expressionism. Of the turn to a deepening concern with inner lives, Hirschmann was more than aware. He was captivated by its mysteries.
⁵

What can be said of this early learning? One is that from a very early age, the German language may have been his mother tongue (
Muttersprache
), but it was not his home (
Heimat
). He spoke German among his family and with his friends, but he was at a fundamental ease, and developed a love for, other languages and their literatures from youth; starting with French, he became fluent in English, then Italian, and eventually Spanish and some passable Portuguese. Another is that Otto Albert was walking through doors—even as a teenager—that his parents deliberately opened for him even though they could not share in the discovery of what lay beyond. In some respects, this is just another reminder of the endless sequence of intergenerational gaps that have shaped humanity. But unlike so many other cases, for Otto Albert the gap was not a source of friction; there is no evidence that the son and his parents fought over central values. Some credit for this goes to his parents, and especially Carl, who encouraged OA’s explorations. In not getting in the way, they emancipated themselves from becoming the target of his separation. When the rupture came, it was not a shock, nor did it require a repudiation of what the young Otto Albert inherited; he did not have to reject his personal past in order to move forward, another theme that would resonate in his writings decades later.

And yet, there was an underlying continuity with the German tradition of
Bildung
, which was especially appealing to upper-middle-class urbanites determined to claim that their achievements and successes in life were the result of education and self-creation and less of inheritance. It conformed well to the spirit of Weimar Republicanism, even if it created an odor of self-importance and arrogance, which irritated the republic’s critics.
⁶
There was a hodgepodge to the mix of Weimar cosmopolitanism,
New Objectivism, and traditional Bildung values, which reflected many of the crosscurrents and compromises within Weimar republicanism. But for the sons of the city’s meritocrats, consistency was probably not the goal; this was a generation coping with the challenge of living with the hangover of industrial-scale violence and mass democracy while preserving some sense that individual improvement and the personal development had something to do with containing the conflicts around them. They were too young to be so profoundly marked by the Great War, as were the Brechts or the Manns, or even to contemplate the psychoanalytic dimensions of mass society, such as the up-and-coming affiliates of the Frankfurt School.

OA and his mates were too young to catch the edge of the avant-garde and move with it, yet old enough to be clear-eyed witnesses to the destruction of the world in which it thrived.

The Collège Français was more than an intellectual hothouse. It was a social one too, and for Otto Albert, an escape from family. Otto Albert made close friends among his classmates. Wolfgang Rosenberg met OA in the Hegel study group, and they became fast friends and rowing partners. A photo of the two boys, probably when they were around fifteen years old, has them climbing rocks on one of the school’s frequent outings. A centerpiece of the boys’ social lives was the frequent rowing trips in the autumn, at Easter, and on summer vacations. Some of these lasted for over a week. June 1930 was a blazing month; the family had gone to Arosa, Switzerland (increasingly, a preferred alternative to the German beaches) to escape the thirty-plus degree (Celsius) heat. There was a rowing tournament involving schools and clubs from around Germany. OA went with his teammates, sharing a tent with Peter Franck, Wolfgang Rosenberg, and Helmut Mühsam. While not competing they took side trips to farms and went climbing. There were also academic obligations; Otto Albert assured his parents that Professor Levinstein “gave us until after the vacation for the French essay,” though he did require them to read a German essay, “What makes Coriolan (a Beethoven composition based on the play Coriolanus) become enemy of his Fatherland?, so I will still have a bit to do.”
⁷
Teams became the centerpiece of school social life and required some amount of investment, not just of time but also of money. Crews shared the ownership of three, four, or five boats—depending on their competitive ambitions. One autumn ritual involved graduating the rowers from the previous year’s lowerclassmen to the upper-class ranks before taking to the water—presumably to row more like men. This world of masculine play also included long hikes and bicycle trips, all shepherded by the faculty who would make sure that the students were sure to learn their medieval history by studying cathedrals and castles en route.
⁸