Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (11 page)

The summer of 1930 was hot in more than one sense. It was also a summer of intense electioneering, in which, as Hirschman later put it, “speaking of politics” became an irreversible process, culminating on September 14, when voters shocked the country.
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With the country reeling from depression, the numbers of jobless rising, and the government unable to contain the crisis, the ruling Social Democrats were pummeled. While remaining the single largest party, their share of the vote sagged to a quarter. Meanwhile, the number of Nazi seats in the federal parliament soared from 14 to 107, and the party swept more than 18 percent of the vote to become the country’s second-largest electoral machine. The young Hirschmann was not yet directly involved, but these were the first elections that he watched and discussed closely, especially with his closest schoolmates Franck, Rosenberg, and Mühsam. It was a dramatic event with catastrophic effects as the government gambled on the belief that it could gain more popular support in the midst of a worsening economic crisis and with louder and louder spoilers on its heels.

Club Riedervelein rowing team, 1929. Otto Albert is in the middle row, far right.

One reason the boys were so engaged was because the Nazi expansion was also evident at school. Otto Albert’s physical education teacher—a gay man who was eventually evicted from the gymnasium for cavorting with another, fascist, student—was open about his affection for Hitler and wore a swastika around his arm. Yet, he liked Otto Albert; though a Jew, he was good at sports. Initially, the swastikas seemed innocuous; it was only with Otto Albert’s political awakening that he became aware of the symbolic menace. Nazis were not just
his
political enemies; he was
theirs
too.
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This realization did not, however, come overnight. Indeed, the school was a kind of sanctuary for the boys to explore their interests and make fun of authorities. Alfred Blumenfeld made plans to sabotage the Abitur-award ceremony. During intermissions between classes, the boys gathered outside to plot and joke at the teachers but always in a register that would not affront their sensibilities. During the ceremony, one ringleader would call aloud the first line of a famous ballad by Goethe, “Erlkönig,” which reads:

Who rides, so late, through night and wind?

It is the father with his child.

Instead of replying with the original, the chorus of boys would bellow, “Natürlich wieder die Juden!” (Once again the Jews, of course!), followed by an uproar of adolescent laughter.
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Such pranks were youthful expressions of what in other settings was escalating into a full-scale confrontation. In Berlin’s crowded working-class
neighborhoods, the hardened world of tenement houses and dawn-until-dusk workdays, Communist and Nazi gangs were slugging it out for control of the streets—and more so as the republic crumbled. For the gentrified folk, the arguments, for the time being, were still more polite affairs. It would quickly change. Many years later, when Hirschman returned to Berlin with his wife and one of his daughters, they paid a visit to the White Rose Museum to see an exhibition about Count Claus von Stauffenberg and the officers who conspired to assassinate Hitler. They gazed at the displays of documents, read the texts to each other, and pointed at artifacts. Albert explained to Sarah and Katia the distant history to which he had been witness. Nearby, there was a group of school children escorted by a teacher. The teacher, overhearing Albert’s accounts, could not resist the opportunity to ask him if he would be willing to “say a few words to the students because it would be so fascinating to hear someone from that time.” Albert’s German was not what it once was, but he accepted. The children sat down in front of him, and Albert shared a few early details of his life at school, his teachers, and the politics of the time. Then came the questions: “Did you know any Nazis?” Albert, slightly surprised, replied, “Of course, in my class there were lots of Nazis.” The students were shocked: “And did you talk to them?” “Well, of course,” Albert replied. “We were all the time discussing, trying to convince each other.” A half century later, it was not easy for German children to understand that, before the Nazi triumph, in some quarters there could be conversations and athletic tournaments with pariahs.
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Still, the divisions at school, restricted to pranks and schoolyard taunting, were the shadows of much greater danger outside the sanctuary of the Collège. Beyond its walls, the radicalization of young men like Otto Albert reorganized their sense of the world. So, while still part of their parents’ orbits, they were becoming more critical of them, or at least finding themselves removed from them. Nowhere was this clearer than the reception and influence of Marxist thinking. It was, of course, not uncommon for the scions of the Berlin professional elite to embrace a philosophy that trumpeted the cause of the German working class. In order to appreciate its significance for this generation, it helps to put the
circulation of Marxism into a specific time and place: the beginnings of the Great Depression, the spread of authoritarian responses to it, and the crumbling of the precarious postwar order. “Crisis” was not the overused buzzword that it is today. In the early 1930s it had a special valence. It was not mere coincidence that the summer of 1930 also saw Heinrich Ehrmann take Otto Albert under his wing at a summer reading group and presented the fourteen-year-old with a copy of Marx’s
Das Kapital
. This was not the kind of work that OA rushed off to read; he did not begin systematic reading until the following year, by which time the
Communist Manifesto
and two volumes of
Der Historische Materialismus
were also on his bookshelf.
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But it marked a turning point, nonetheless. Marxism offered to Hirschmann and his classmates a new key, an “exciting” way to make sense of the confrontations unfolding around them. For Hirschmann, it provided a Weltanschauung he sought but which his father had disavowed, an intellectual compass, not unimportant for a young man studying the history of German idealism and the fate of its republican progeny.

But the extra thrill came from a worldview’s political relevance. Marxists not only had sturdy bookshelves, they also had a party—several parties in fact, some of which had tentacular reach in the Collège through active alumni or teachers. Like the republic, the gymnasium could accommodate seemingly irreconcilable currents. In this sense, Otto Albert was under no pressure to choose the classics over Marxism; immersion in one did not require the rejection of others. Home and school provided havens for a certain learned eclecticism, which was especially significant in light of the polarities developing in Berlin’s political sphere.

The recruitment of Otto Albert, and then Ursula, into politics came in 1931, by which time a verbal war between Left and Right was in full swing. But not just between Left and Right. So too was a clash between Socialists and Communists, who were in the advanced stages of enmity, with the Communist Party (KPD) hurling charges of
Sozialfaschismus
(social fascism) at the Social Democratic Party (SPD) rivals. Socialists, went the charge, were as loathsome as the bourgeois they consorted with in the Weimar governing coalition. It was Ehrmann who told Otto Albert
about the Workers Socialist Youth (Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend; SAJ), an organization that had branches in all Berlin neighborhoods immersed in the block-by-block struggle for power on the left. Not a few SAJs despaired at the pragmatic moderation of their party leaders, but they were not willing to give up their faith in a parliamentary road to revolution. The Tiergarten had a chapter of the SAJ, though its working class members were in short supply. It was connected to a larger network that convened for giant assemblies at the Sportpalast, Berlin’s largest meeting hall, located on the Genthinerstrasse in the working class area of Schöneberg. Here, the left-wing vertical mosaic of Berlin’s social classes would gather. Indeed, the Sportpalast was emerging as the central stage of Berlin’s political theater. Hitler delivered his first official speech there to enraptured crowds in September 1930. Otto Albert’s political engagement was not only induced by a mentor. On his own, he, like many of his generation, was developing a sense of concern about the survival of the republic; the devastating September 1930 elections revealed its fundamental weaknesses. Thus began OA’s militancy. His SAJ group was firmly committed to the SPD and was meant to rally the support of youth, especially as the electoral climate began to heat up. But as with so many such efforts, the mobilization brought internal fissures and debates within the party. Political debate in small gatherings or mass rallies was therefore concerned about the fascist menace on one hand and the relationship between the republic and socialism on the other.
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With his homework done and supper finished, Otto Albert would slip out of the apartment to attend meetings at the Sportpalast. One evening, Otto Albert and Ursula left to attend a lecture by the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer. Having read some of his tracts in one of the gymnasium reading groups, OA was discovering a fascination for something called economics. Bauer delivered a spellbinding lecture about Kondratiev long cycles—the theory that economic systems were vulnerable to extended periods (about forty years) of ups and downs associated with spurts and declines of technological breakthroughs. At the time, it was for many a compelling explanation of the Depression, though it landed Nikolai Kondratiev in the Gulag; it raised fundamental concerns about
Stalin’s planning theories. What Bauer did that evening was explain the cycle to his audience. A great boom that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century had long since crested. Now it was in crisis. A new economic model was imminent, and socialists had to be sure to ride the forthcoming cycle. The data-filled presentation was an intellectual tonic as well as a political one. Here was a leader of the Austrian Socialist Party discussing books, economic patterns, and political implications. Here was an analysis that combined them, and a man whose charisma conveyed it. This was unlike anything Otto Albert had heard from his own party leaders or from his teachers. If there was a single event that convinced him to study economics, it was that night at the Sportpalast; five decades later, Hirschman could still close his eyes and reconstruct Bauer’s performance.

These encounters with captivating intellectual figures, reading the theoretical analyses of the calamity, and the pressing sense of crisis motivated Otto Albert to explore the connections between thought and action. This preoccupation pushed him further beyond the Collège and into the circles of SAJ militants. The explosive election of 1930 at the end of the summer, whose results blared across Berlin’s headlines—Nazi Victory!—added drama to the theory. While Otto Albert was reading Marx and Marxists for the first time, the Social Democratic Party, with which he and his parents were aligned, was undergoing an ever-deepening party
crise de coeur
. Discussions and debates reflected the growing political unease around the country, especially in Berlin, which shifted from the world’s capital of avant-garde modernism to the global epicenter of crisis thinking and the frantic search for alternatives.

Among socialists, these anxieties spilled into a vibrant internal debate and growing calls for change of tactics and new visions. Weekend excursions by militants were devoted to discussions of important tracts, workshops in political tactics, and plans for future meetings. On Sundays, OA and sometimes Ursula, who would later affiliate with the Communist Party, donned their blue shirts and red kerchiefs and took the train to assemblies in the countryside. Youth hostels became the meeting grounds for leftist students and young workers from around Berlin. Erich Schmidt, the charismatic head of the SAJ chapter in Berlin, steered the
group further to the left within the Social Democrats and argued for the creation of a coalition of Social Democrats and Communists. In this, he was taking on the SPD establishment, incarnate in the Reichstag faction of the Brüning (of the Center Party) government, which was desperately trying to cope with a growing crisis and focusing on the older party line. Figures like Erich Ollenhauer and Rudolf Hilferding “tolerated” the bourgeois parties and put their trust in Brüning until he dropped the remaining Socialists from his coalition and brought in Nazis as part of his botched electoral gambit. In the meantime, the SPD leadership stuck with a government that had swung to such deflationary, antilabor, pro-military, pro-clerical, and even increasingly anti-Semitic standpoints that it made a mockery of whatever the republic’s reformists and moderate socialists had envisioned. Rudolf Hilferding wrote to the elder SPD leader and intellectual, Karl Kautsky, on December 1 that “the situation is certainly unpleasant. The fascist danger still threatens and the increase [in support] for the Communists disturbs our people even more. Indeed, a further advance in this direction would certainly bring the greatest danger that the attraction of the Communists would increase powerfully as soon as they surpassed our numbers. It is not a pretty scene, but adventurous stupidities would only make matters worse.” As if to mock the SPD leader’s cautionary diagnosis, two months later Hindenburg named Hitler Chancellor of Germany.
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