Disziplinentwicklung und Wissenschaftstransfer - Deutschsprachige Psychologen in der Emigration

(Discipline development and the transfer of science - German-speaking psychologists in the emigration). In this essay recently developed ideas from the social history of science, in particular the notion that there are historically conditioned ?national professional styles”? in science, are applied to the transfer of psychological theory - and of scientific psychologists - from German-speaking lands to the United States before and after 1933. After an overview of the scope and structure of the emigration in psychology, an analysis of the transfer process is offered focusing upon Gestalt theory.     

Technische Intelligenz im Exil. Zum Einfluß emigrierter deutschsprachiger Ingenieure auf die Ingenieurwissenschaften in Großbritannien 1933 bis 1945

This article deals with the emigration and the experiences of the professional group of engineers in their British exile, trying to evaluate the influences these refugee engineers had on the British engineering science. The approach is not limited to engineering research at universities or technical colleges, but tries to include the aspect of research and development on the level of the firm. Limits and constraints of gaining influence in British engineering are discussed, such as different values and traditions as well as the different traditions in technical education and the role of the engineering graduate in industry. Finally attempts are made to establish some fields of engineering where an identifiable influence can be traced without exaggerating the general influence of these German speaking refugee engineers. Those identifiable fields are machine tools, fuel technology and district heating.     

Österreichische Ärzteemigration 1934-1945 - Zwischen neuem Tätigkeitsgebiet und organisierten Rückkehrplänen

Information on emigrant doctors and university teachers of medicine from Austria is rather poor up to now. This article is a preliminary sketch to give a first impression of the problems, quantity and quality of the doctors' emigration. First, there is made a distinction between different groups of emigrants, who emigrated at different times owing to the political changes in Austria (civil war and ?Anschluß”?). Then the emigration prior to the political set-ups during the thirties is discussed. The assertion is made, that the reasons for emigrating during the twenties are very much the same than in later years. Hostility against Jews, socialists, democrats and foreigners made living and working conditions increasingly unbearable. Concerning the influence of emigrated scientists on science and learning in immigration countries some theoretical and clinical sub-specialties of medicine are examined, e.g. social medicine, internal medicine, pharmacology, orthopedic surgery and child psychiatry. Whereas in some cases the influence is minimal, e.g. social medicine, other disciplines have been influenced enormously, e.g. child psychiatry. Finally there follows a short examination of the organisations of Austrian doctors and medical scientists in the United States and Great Britain.     

Nuclear Physicists in a New World. The Émigrés of the 1930s in America

Kernphysiker in einer neuen Welt: Die Emigranten der dreißiger Jahre in Amerika. - Unter der großen Anzahl derjenigen, die durch Nationalsozialismus zur Emigration gezwungen wurden und zwischen 1933 und 1941 in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika einwanderten, befanden sich auch mehr als hundert Physiker, und unter ihnen einige der genialsten Kernphysiker der Welt. Die Physik in Amerika hatte damals den Status einer voll ausgereiften Wissenschaft erreicht, und so kam es zu einem bedeutsamen und facettenreichen Zusammenwirken zwischen den emigrierten und den einheimischen Kernphysikern, zumal sie die verschiedenen Forschungsgebiete vertraten, die sich durch die Entdeckungen und Erfindungen des Jahres 1932 (Neutron, Deuterium, Positron, Cockcroft-Walton-Beschleuniger, Zyklotron) aufgetan hatten. Von besonderer Bedeutung Für die Konsolidierung und Entwicklung der gesamten Kernphysik war dabei die Veröffentlichung von drei Artikeln in den Reviews of Modern Physics von 1936 und 1937, bekannt als die ?Bethe-Bibel”?. Nach der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung von 1938 und dem Ausbruch des Krieges 1939 in Europa wirkte die Befürchtung, daß Hitler eine Atomwaffe erhalten könnte, als mächtige, Emigranten und Nicht-Emigranten gleichermaßen erfassende einigende Kraft unter den Atomphysikern in Amerika, und die meisten von ihnen stellten ihre Fähigkeiten in den Dienst der US-Regierung und arbeiteten am Manhatten-Projekt und an anderen militärischen Forschungsvorhaben mit. Bei Kriegsende waren die in den dreißiger Jahren emigrierten Kernphysiker wie so viele Flüchtlinge vor ihnen Amerikaner geworden, und keiner von ihnen kehrte in sein Geburtsland zurück. Among the large number of refugees from Nazism and Fascism entering the United States between 1933 and 1941 were more than 100 physicists, including some of the most gifted nuclear physicists in the world. By that time physics in America had come of age, and a remarkable and multifaceted symbiosis occurred between the émigré and native-born nuclear physicists as they pursued the many avenues of research opened up by the discoveries and inventions of 1932 (neutron, deuterium, positron, Cockcroft-Walton accelerator, cyclotron). Of particular importance for the consolidation and development of the entire field of nuclear physics was the publication in 1936–37 of the three articles in the Revieus of Modern Physics known as the ?Bethe Bible”?. With the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the fear that a nuclear weapon might fall into Hitler's hands served as a powerful unifying force among nuclear physicists in Amerika, émigrés and non-émigrés alike, and most placed their talents in the service of the United States Government working on the Manhattan Project and other wartime research. By the end of the war, like so many refugees before them, the émigré nuclear physicists of the 1930s had become Americans, and not one of them returned to the country of his birth.     

WHO SUFFERED FROM THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM? A DUTCH EXAMPLE

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working‐class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo‐Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms.     

MAKING HISTORY BY CONTEXTUALIZING ONESELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERVENTION

This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Elliott created a new form of academic life‐writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical‐autobiographical genre—including the subgenre of the “autobiographical paper”—and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author's own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians’ autobiographies, including ego‐historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Historiography as a political battlefield (1956–1989): Italian left-wing historians on early German Social Democracy

The debate surrounding German Social Democracy during the era of the Second International represents an important chapter in the historiography of post-Second World War Italy. At the same time, it also marks some crucial moments in the political and intellectual life of Republican Italy. This article aims to show the close relationship between the investigation of the past and the ongoing political struggle that has characterised research on this issue. Study of the topic was practically monopolised by left-wing historians, who, in dealing with the history of German Social Democracy, aimed also to direct the political strategy of workers' parties. Considering the studies appearing after the 1956 crisis and in the mid-1970s, such a goal seems evident. It was only during the 1980s that the research opened itself to different perspectives – no longer influenced by ideological controversies.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

Narratives in Anecdotes,Memory and Interlocutors: An Early Engagement with Neville Alexander’s Story

In this article, I present a story about South African Marxist and activist-scholar Neville Edward Alexander. As historians, social scientists and intellectuals embedded in the humanities, a part of the job we have awarded ourselves or that we assume to be part of our disciplinary reasoning, our intellectual orbit, is to bring to life the periods that, and the people about whom, we reflect. This we do through writing and telling stories, often constructed with a “moral message” of sorts. In these acts of writing and story-telling, objectivity plays a disputed and a precarious role, and misrepresentations could be conscious or unwitting. The lack of objectivity in bringing to life the period and the people we talk about in our stories, in our exaggeration and our understatement about what we have read, about what we have heard, and then about what we write, is part of an academic’s narrative. These human traits of exaggeration and understatement can lead to historical error. In this early exploration of seeking answers to the questions, “Who is Neville Alexander?” and “What can we learn from his writings?” I offer two anecdotes about the man. My proposition is that overcoming historical error does not rest exclusively with factual verification. It has to factor in an appraisal of the ideological intention or even political wish of the people telling the stories, in written texts and orally, and of the interlocutors’ context that we recover in our historical studies. In writing this preliminary sketch of Alexander, I take a detour into higher education issues, particularly the field of doctoral studies, and I paraphrase some of the concerns that have been raised by Alexander. I conclude this introductory study with some thoughts on Alexander’s contributions to social change, to “race,” and to language policy and multilingualism.     

„… daß Sie Ihre Tätigkeit einstellen müssen”︁: Die Entlassung Sergej Tschachotins aus dem Heidelberger Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut 1933

“…that you must have to stop working here.” How Sergej Chakhotin was forced to leave the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg in 1933. - In this essay the author presents some basically unpublished material according to the dismissal of the Russian natural scientist Sergej Chakhotin, a former assistant of I. P. Pavlov. Chakhotin, who got a sholarship granted by an American institution, worked since 1930 at the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg, as a scientist. Moreover, he practically engaged himself in the political struggle of the German Social Democrats against Nazism and, in 1932, created the at that time well-known symbol of the Three Arrows. But he was - being a Soviet citizen - a guest in Germany. His political activity was the very reason for his discharge in April, 1933, and even the engagement of some prominent academic collegues was not able to stop the administration measure. So Chakhotin became a political refugee like some of his German collegues.     

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT,CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.     

HAUNTING HISTORY: DECONSTRUCTION AND THE SPIRIT OF REVISION1

This essay explores the ways that the specter of deconstruction has been haunting history over the past thirty years, in particular this specter's effects on the revision of intellectual and cultural history. The essay uses the terms “specter” and “haunting” to express the fact that while deconstruction is repeatedly targeted in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn, very few historians actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; in this regard the target has always been a phantom. However, some historians have employed the methods of deconstruction, and by examining their work as well as the attacks on it the essay attempts to explain the historiographical reasons behind these attacks. The goal of the essay is ultimately to indicate some of the ways that deconstruction is useful for the historian, as evidenced in the project of historical revision.     

The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.     

Pivoting toward Asia: Comparing the Canadian and American Policy Shifts

Both Canada and the United States have “pivoted” toward Asia in their foreign policy over the past decade, although emphases in those pivots differed between the two countries. The former focuses on an economic pivot initially, the latter on a security one. What factors explain these shifts? What was the magnitude of policy change by both? Utilizing some important theoretical works by Charles Hermann, we discuss the factors that appear to have brought about this policy change toward Asia, outline the actions and activities that both countries have initiated toward Asia in the past decade to illustrate the type and magnitude of policy change that has occurred, and compare some areas of political, economic, and military similarities between Canada and the United States toward this region. Finally, we assess the likely future of these pivots to Asia in light of the change in political leadership within both nations.     

the Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel

During the last two decades, a surge of historical revisionism has commanded considerable attention in both academia and the public sphere, as historians have linked their understandings of the past to salient problems and identity crises of the present. Increasingly, the histories of nations have been problematized and have become the object of commemorative battles. Historiographical disputes thus reveal no less about contemporary political sensibilities than they do about a nation's history. This article situates the proliferation of historical revisionism within the context of ongoing negotiations regarding the meaning of the nation at the end of the twentieth century. Through a comparison of recent historians' disputes in Germany and Israel, I explore the relationship between revisionism and collective memory, and the ways in which both are reflective of and contribute to the reformation of national identification. While national identities are usually predicated on continuities with the past, new German and Israeli identities are being defined in opposition to the founding myths of their nation-states. Both are continuously reassessing their pasts, negotiating the balance between a commitment to universal (democratic) values and the persistence of particularistic (ethnic) traditions. To be sure, national pasts have been contested before, but until recently the primacy of the nation itself was not significantly challenged. I suggest understanding the ongoing phenomenon of national demystification in the context of changing state–society relations. States no longer enjoy the same hegemonic power over the means of collective commemoration. In contrast to the state-supportive role of historians during the formative phase of nationalism, collective memory has become an increasingly contested terrain. In both countries, revisionists from the left and right self-consciously struggle to provide historical narratives of their nation's past to suit their present political views of the future.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

Almost anyone who can read would describe the Supreme Court of the United States as a legal body–an institution that says what the law is in the context of deciding cases. May the Court also be fairly described as a political institution? Even to pose the question raises eyebrows, because Americans commonly use the word “political” to refer to partisan politics—that persistent struggle between organized groups called political parties to control public offices, public resources, and the nation’s destiny. In this sense of the word, the federal courts are expected today to be “above politics,” meaning that judges are supposed to refrain from publicly taking sides in elections, from otherwise jumping into the arena of electoral combat, 2 or from deciding cases based on the popularity of the litigants.3 While democratic theory anticipates that elected officials will answer to the people, the rule of law envisions something different: an abiding and even‐handed application by the judiciary of the Constitution and statutes shaped by the people and their representatives.     

Learning soft skills the hard way: Historiographical considerations on the cultural adjustment process of German-speaking émigré neuroscientists in Canada, 1933 to 1963

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the special forms of knowledge generation and knowledge transmission that occur along local cultural boundaries in the modern neurosciences. Following the inauguration of the so-called “Law on the Re-Establishment of a Professional Civil Service” in Nazi Germany on April 7, 1933, hundreds of Jewish and oppositional neurologists, neuropathologists, and psychiatrists were forced out of their academic positions, having to leave their home countries and local knowledge economies and traditions for Canada and the United States. A closer analysis of their living and working conditions will create an understanding of some of the elements and factors that determined the international forced migration waves of physicians and clinical neuroscientists in the twentieth century from a historiographical perspective. While I am particularly looking here at new case examples regarding the forced migration during the National Socialist period in Germany, the analysis follows German-speaking émigré neurologists and psychiatrists who found refuge and settled in Canada. These individuals form an understudied group of refugee medical professionals, despite the fact that the subsegments of refugee neurologists and clinical psychoanalysts in the United States, for example, have been a fairly well-investigated population, as the works of Grob (1983), Lunbeck (1995), or Ash and Soellner (1996) have shown. This article is primarily an exploration of the adjustment and acculturation processes of several highly versatile and well-rounded German-speaking physicians, who had received their prior education in neurology, psychiatry, and basic brain research. They were forced out of their academic home institutions and had to leave their clinical research fields as well as their disciplinary self-understanding behind on the other side of the Atlantic.     

A History of the Future

Does history have to be only about the past? “History” refers to both a subject matter and a thought process. That thought process involves raising questions, marshalling evidence, discerning patterns in the evidence, writing narratives, and critiquing the narratives written by others. Whatever subject matter they study, all historians employ the thought process of historical thinking. What if historians were to extend the process of historical thinking into the subject matter domain of the future? Historians would breach one of our profession’s most rigid disciplinary barriers. Very few historians venture predictions about the future, and those who do are viewed with skepticism by the profession at large. On methodological grounds, most historians reject as either impractical, quixotic, hubristic, or dangerous any effort to examine the past as a way to make predictions about the future. However, where at one time thinking about the future did mean making a scientifically–based prediction, futurists today are just as likely to think in terms of scenarios. Where a prediction is a definitive statement about what will be, scenarios are heuristic narratives that explore alternative plausibilities of what might be. Scenario writers, like historians, understand that surprise, contingency, and deviations from the trend line are the rule, not the exception; among scenario writers, context matters. The thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. With only minimal intellectual adjustment, then, most professionally trained historians possess the necessary skills to write methodologically rigorous “histories of the future.”     

Ethical Responsibility and the Historian: On the Possible End of a History "of a Certain Kind"

In this article I try to answer the question posed by History and Theory's“call for papers”; namely, “do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” To do this I draw mainly (but not exclusively and somewhat unevenly) on three texts: Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, J. F. Lyotard's The Differend, and Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual; Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have a presence too, albeit a largely absent one. Together, I argue that these theorists (intellectuals) enable me to draw a portrait of an ethically responsible intellectual. I then consider whether historians qua historians have some kind of ethical responsibility—to somebody or to something—over and above that of the intellectual qua intellectual; I reply negatively. And this negative reply has implications for historians. For if historians are to be intellectuals of the type I outline here, then they must end their present practices insofar as they do not fulfill the criteria for the type of ethical responsibility I have argued for. Consequently, to be “ethical” in the way suggested perhaps signals—as the subtitle of my paper suggests—the possible end of a history “of a certain kind” and, as the inevitable corollary, the end of a historian “of a certain kind” too.