Malcolm Richardson
Buried in the annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation for 1930 lies a cryptic reference to a German educational bursary with an unlikely name: the Abraham Lincoln Stiftung (ALS). The organization's odd name - combining the German word for foundation with the name of an American president - was intended to symbolize the possibility that a democratic educational system might provide both social mobility and humane leadership. The creation of this German foundation with American money remains one of the best-kept secrets in the history of Rockefeller philanthropy. The Lincoln Stiftung began its short, tumultuous life in 1927 in the afterglow of Locarno and died a violent death seven years later, another victim in the wreckage created by Hitler's seizure of power.
During its short existence the ALS recruited many of the Weimar Republic's ablest intellectuals to help it identify exceptionally gifted younger scholars, artists, and writers. Among those who took part as "talent scouts" were Marianne Weber, the widow of Max Weber; Paul Tillich; Herman Hesse; Walter Gropius; Käthe Kollwitz; visionary educators Kurt Hahn and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; publishers Heinrich Simon and Eugen Diederichs; Prussian educational reformer Carl Heinrich Becker; and such statesmen as Willy Hellpach, Anton Erkelenz, and Wilhelm Sollmann - the latter three were prominent figures in the politics of the Weimar coalition and firm supporters of the Republic.
The Lincoln Stiftung had great ambitions but few resources. Although only a handful of the names of its sixty or so grant recipients would be recognized today, a longer list of 133 candidates whom the directors of the ALS apparently intended to recommend or consider for aid suggests that, had it continued its activities for a few years longer, the Lincoln Stiftung would have become internationally famous. Just before 1933 the directors of the Lincoln Stiftung listed Hannah Arendt, Waldemar Gurian, Klaus Mehnert, and even Albert Schweitzer as possible fellowship recipients. However, within a few months the ALS's directors and many of its advisers and fellows were fleeing Germany.
This essay attempts to provide a factual summary of the Lincoln Stiftung's origins and development and as full a listing of its advisers and fellows as the surviving documentary record permits. Because many of the organization's records apparently have been lost, a number of interesting questions about the ALS's operations and its choices of fellowship recipients must remain unanswered. At the same time, the Lincoln Stiftung's ambitious goals also invite speculation about the extent to which external philanthropists and liberal internationalists could have worked to strengthen the ill-fated Weimar Republic and whether the kinds of educational reform envisaged by its directors could have effected fundamental changes at German universities. Finally, the ALS's insistence on finding unrecognized genius or unfulfilled talent, and the involvement of many of its founders with the opposition to Hitler, demands an effort to examine the subsequent careers of its fellows. Although I can only begin to sketch a collective portrait of its fellows and leadership in the 1930s, even a preliminary assessment must at least consider some important issues about the younger generation's relationship to the events of 1933. Although I cannot fully answer the questions I intend to raise, I believe the case of the Lincoln Stiftung offers an opportunity for further research into the relationships among the youth movement, the educational system, and the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Background
From the outset the Lincoln Stiftung was an unusual example of German-American collaboration. When the ALS was formed in 1927 by a group of liberal German educators, both its German and American sponsors thought the enterprise was better left unpublicized, and accordingly made no public announcement. In the following year, when the trustees of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial voted to give money to the new German organization, they took care to keep their gift a well-guarded secret. The minutes of the memorial, a foundation created by John D. Rockefeller to commemorate his wife, record this decision: "The funds will be submitted to the Lincoln Stiftung through . . . [an] intermediary in order that the donor shall remain anonymous."1 Shrouded in secrecy at birth, the Lincoln Stiftung has remained virtually unknown until today.2
That a gift from an American foundation, and especially one destined for the support of scholars and teachers in the humanities, could potentially be so controversial, and thus require such caution, seems difficult to believe in retrospect. To understand this discretion it is necessary to recall the fevered political climate of Weimar Germany. Although the Republic had weathered serious crises, and the Locarno pact and a brief prosperity created the illusion of stability, bitterness toward the Allied nations remained while political hatreds, religious differences, and class distinctions poisoned Weimar politics. The universities, rooted in Imperial Germany, remained conservative and suspicious of, if not hostile to, the Republic. As an experiment with American methods of philanthropy, the Lincoln Stiftung was implicitly critical of the German universities and educational bureaucracy.
The idea of a private foundation pursuing its own ends independent of government direction was not a familiar one to most Europeans in the 1920s, but Germany boasted thousands of charitable institutions and trusts devoted to the welfare of orphans, students, and the sick. Moreover, Germany's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society) had pioneered the use of private funds to create advanced scientific institutes whose research work was conducted independently of the state-supported universities. Germany's network of private foundations and research institutes suffered a severe blow in the early 1920s with the onset of runaway inflation. Suddenly, institutions with millions of marks in assets watched as the purchasing power of their endowments disappeared. In response, German scientists and scholars created new institutions such as the Notgemeinschaft für deutschen Wissenschaft, or Emergency Committee for German Science, or the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (Student Foundation of the German People) and sought help from both government budgets and private donations. Although prominent industrialists provided some support, the uneven economic recovery made private funding difficult, and these new institutions - like the universities they served - relied heavily on state support. It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that the creation of the Lincoln Stiftung was the result not so much of German as American initiative. Even more precisely, the Lincoln Stiftung experiment originated in a three-sided collaboration among the American donors, three German educators, and a remarkable English man of letters, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, whose life was to become intertwined with that of the ALS. In the interval between its creation in a period of optimism and its destruction in one of depression and despair, the Lincoln Stiftung managed to suggest ways in which a democratic educational system could be constructed from the aristocratic and conservative one bequeathed to the Weimar Republic by the old empire.
Critical of their country's class distinctions and limited access to higher education, the German organizers of the Lincoln Stiftung - principally Carl Heinrich Becker, Hans Simons, and Reinhold Schairer - sought to promote the careers of a more democratic corps of teachers. As a consequence of this stance, the advisory board of the Lincoln Stiftung included a disproportionately large number of youth movement leaders, pacifists, feminists, adult education specialists, and educational experimenters.
The Lincoln Stiftung developed a national network of consultants, or nominators, who sought to find outstanding if unconventional minds and gifted individuals of both sexes who were not well served by the German academic system. Also included in this search were youths whose service during wartime or whose background at ordinary popular schools precluded admission to the German universities. More than a few of the Lincoln Stiftung's fellows held leadership roles in various youth groups - trade union or socialist in the northern industrial cities, Catholic in the Rhineland and southern Germany - and a number participated actively in various movements for international reconciliation. Perhaps not surprisingly, several of the Lincoln Stiftung's directors and advisers later distinguished themselves in the resistance to Hitler, while many more, including the directors Hans Simons and Reinhold Schairer, fled Germany after 1933. Of the 101 intellectual leaders listed as advisers or consultants in the ALS's first report to the memorial, over a quarter emigrated and several others - most notably Theodor Haubach and Adolf Reichwein, who were executed for their part in plots against Hitler - participated actively in the German resistance. The Lincoln Stiftung's advisers and fellows were, by and large, educators; Becker and his associates sought to create a generation of teachers committed not to any one party or political creed but to democratic values generally. That such an aim should require outside funds was an admission that the German backers might find politically embarrassing, and they readily agreed to the oddest part of the Lincoln Stiftung plan: its anonymity. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Becker and the other German directors saw in the ALS a way to circumvent the conservative educational bureaucracy and the no less conservative universities.
The Rockefeller Philanthropies and Postwar Internationalism
On the American side the creation of the Lincoln Stiftung can be traced to a desire on the part of the Rockefeller philanthropists to aid the cause of international reconciliation. In the years immediately following World War I each Rockefeller philanthropy - and there were several until most were merged into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928 - searched for ways to promote international understanding.3 The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, a fund devoted primarily to the social sciences, proved especially active in fostering international exchanges and fellowships in its own field of reference.4 In the mid-1920s the memorial, in its attempt to improve international understanding, sought to examine the process by which educational systems reproduced prejudices and nationalist sentiment. To this end it commissioned a series of studies. Directed by the political scientist Charles Merriam of the University of Chicago, these studies of civic education in France, Germany, Italy, and Russia suggested that national education systems continued to foster dangerous animosities among the former belligerents of World War I.5
By promoting international exchanges and by funding
European educators who were active on behalf of internationalist causes,
the memorial's president, Arthur Woods, and its executive
director, Beardsley Ruml, hoped to use the social sciences to counteract
parochialism and narrow-minded patriotism. This American faith in
the efficacy of the social sciences ran into some practical
difficulties, however. Merriam's survey of civic education had noted that
European school curricula reflected a very traditional kind of
education with only limited attention to the newer social sciences. At the same A letter from Woods to Ruml in the summer of 1925 gives
perhaps the most explicit account of what the memorial hoped to
achieve in its early exploration of Europe:
The plan that has gradually formed itself is for a survey
of the field in Europe, to find out in general what is the state
of the Humane Studies, and in particular who are the very
great men in these subjects, under what conditions they are
working, what, if anything, need be done to help them
produce their best work, whether of aid of some kind at home, or
the possibility of international intercourse. Then to find
out about the students: are the best men going into these
studies; if not, why; where are the most brilliant, are they
studying with the masters they should, do they need to go to
other countries for work.6
Woods himself had carried on a one-man inquiry: At Oxford,
at Cambridge, and in London, he spoke with the leading British
intellectuals of the day who were active in the League of Nations
and other international causesGilbert Murray, Goldsworthy
Lowes Dickinson, Ernest Barker, George Macaulay Trevelyan, and
the Fabians Graham Wallas and Beatrice Webb. "They have all been
keen about it, some extremely enthusiastic," Woods reported with
satisfaction.7
It was in the course of these conversations that Woods hit
upon the memorial's consultant for the intended survey of the
humanities in Europe: the British poet and educator Geoffrey
Winthrop Young. "No one had anything except good to say of him,"
Woods wrote Ruml, and after talking with Young, Woods too became convinced that the poet was the right man for the
job.8 Young himself echoed the enthusiasm of Woods, Trevelyan, and the others in
his letter of acceptance. Of Woods's proposed survey Young replied
that "its idealism appealed to every moral
fibre."9
In many respects, Young was an ideal choice. He was well
versed in several European languages. His career as a teacher had
culminated in an appointment as one of His Majesty's Inspectors
of Schools, a prestigious appointment that took him throughout
England and gave him a wealth of experience with different
educational practices. A renowned mountain climber, Young remained
an active figure even after the loss of a leg in World War I and
amazed his contemporaries by continuing to climb with only one leg.
"His successful ascent of the Matterhorn a few years ago, in the face
of what might seem an insuperable disability, ranks as one of the
greatest feats of mountaineering," The
Times of London noted.10 Young, in fact, climbed peak after difficult peak for eighteen years after
the amputation. At his death one mountaineering journal
proclaimed him the best amateur climber of his day, and his companion on
one numbing eighteen-hour climb described Young's endurance that
day as "the greatest physical feat he had ever
witnessed."11
Too old for active duty, Young had volunteered for
dangerous assignments throughout the war - first as a correspondent, then
as the field director of British ambulance units in Belgium and in
Italy where an Austrian shell forced surgeons to sever his leg. His
gallantry and personality could not fail to appeal to Woods and
the American philanthropists; in addition to his undeniable
courage, and quite apart from his linguistic qualifications, Young's
idealism and his faith in voluntarism struck a resonant chord in the offices
of an American foundation that had given millions for Belgian
relief. Finally, Young appealed to the Americans for another reason:
Although he never abandoned his belief that the Germans bore
the major share of the responsibility for the war, four years of
bloodshed and his own personal trauma had burned away the
nationalist ardor of 1914 and transformed Young into a pacifist. "We have
chosen war and must follow it to its undiscriminating end," he
wrote during the war in one passage reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson.
"Let us see to it that it is for the last
time."12
Although Young's initial assignment included all of Europe,
he soon narrowed his focus to Germany. "For reasons too many to set down, Germany must always remain, intellectually, of
principal importance to Europe," Young began a lengthy report to the
memorial.13 He suggested that it make an intensive study of German
needs and then use the experience gained there before expanding its
grant-making in the humanities to other countries. In the meantime,
Young plunged into his work with relish. Following his own advice,
he traveled throughout Germany, visiting the country's principal
intellectual centers and universities.
The Young Report, 1926
Young emerged from his travels through Germany with a
remarkable, even prophetic report on the cultural and intellectual life
of Weimar Germany and its educational system. Beneath the
day-to-day surface of events, Young detected deeper illiberal currents
running through the youth movement, in the universities
themselves, and especially among the student groups. In his portrayal of
the intolerance of many German intellectuals and the growing
alliance of extremist student and youth groups, Young painted a
damning but sometimes penetrating sketch of German education.
He had set out merely to survey the country's humanities
faculties, but in the course of his investigations on behalf of the
American foundation Young discovered an emerging reaction to
the Republic's educational reforms and a growing sense of intense
political partisanship. In particular, Young was alarmed by the
failure of the German universities to foster a sense of political
tolerance that he knew must underlie any democratic society. Yet,
far from being a source of support for the new Republic, Young
found to his dismay that the German universities were instead "the
breeding grounds of active wrong-headedness, of dogmatic
intolerance."14
Young also was appalled by the extent to which politics
played a role in university appointments and in student life. In the view
of this former inspector of English schools, "party views are not
only encouraged to trespass where they do not belong, but they
may - to our thinking - be improperly reinforced by the whole weight
which an authoritative reputation or an official position can
lend."15 Young reported that he had been given reliable information about cases
in which students received scholarships and other prizes as a result of pressures placed on the educational administration by political
figures. Even worse, Young cited cases where the students had tried
to influence faculty appointments. He also intimated that
academic freedom was not entirely guarded by the ranks of the
professors either, citing the case of a professor at Jena whose polemics
against President Paul von Hindenburg had led the nationalists to
demand he be fired. To Young it was apparent in reading the German
press and the academic journals that the "tradition of the professorial
war-letter is not, spiritually, dead" and that Weimar professors were
just as prone to resort to ad hominem attacks on opponents as their
nineteenth-century predecessors had been. "Forbearance with a
dependent, a pupil, even a weaker opponent, does not count for
wisdom or as a virtue," Young ruefully
noted.16
Young's indictment of the German professors repeated the
three-hundred-year-old conflict between British empiricism and
German idealism. But it also reflected a considered view of teaching and
a familiarity with German methods at their best and their worst.
Some twenty years before his mission to Germany on behalf of
Rockefeller philanthropy Young had studied educational theory at the
University of Jena, and the defects of the German penchant for
abstraction had been painfully etched in his memory by one German
theorist. In an unpublished chapter intended for his memoirs, Young
recalled how at Jena he had gone eagerly to listen to the lectures of a
"great pedagogic theorist." The renowned expert proceeded to "give
a course of lectures on how to teach art without illustration from
a single sample drawing or even a blackboard sketch," a
performance Young termed a "masterpiece of sincere
verbiage."17
In addition to the dogmatism to which this abstract
theorizing easily lent itself, Young came to see in the course of his inquiry
for the memorial a second, and no less serious, flaw in the
organization of the universities. Access to the German university was
severely restricted by a series of competitive examinations and
by the fact that secondary education was not free. Because both
students and professors were thus likely to come almost
exclusively from the privileged and wealthy classes, the dangers of an
education that did not encourage researchers to seek practical
experience were increased. Nothing in their university education
was likely to challenge the prejudices of the students, and
accordingly German students in the Weimar period developed an increasingly militant dislike of the Weimar establishment led by moderate
trade unionists and middle-class democrats. If Young deplored a
surprising hostility to new ideas and a dogmatic tendency among
the professors, he denounced the baleful influence of the student
fraternities, the dueling corps, and the even more overtly
political associations. "Their selected
representatives," he explained to Woods and Ruml, "not only take part in many forms of
university government, but advise on such matters as the choices for state
scholarships, etc."18
Far from siding with the underprivileged, the students were,
in the majority, even more reactionary than their professors.
Although Young tended to dismiss student rhetoric as only an "immature
distortion" of the nationalist and conservative views of their elders,
he was forced to report at the same time that the students, taken as
a group, were even more dangerously intolerant than the
nationalist professors. The more politically active among the students,
Young noted, were partisan extremists who did not hesitate to use
intimidation and even violence on occasion against political
opponents. "But, it is of more serious moment for us that there should be
evidence that the corporate students [that is, members of the
dueling corps and other elite fraternities] in their turn, and with
naturally greater crudity [than the professors of the same ideological
bent], seek to establish little short of a 'terrorism' over their
contemporaries of a different political
persuasion."19
In late 1926 the prejudice among the student corps was
anti-republican, and ironically, in a country noted for its respect for
the established authorities, "we have the curious position that an
outspoken Republican, that is, a state supporter, may be blackballed . .
. for any Games Club patronised by the substantial middle
class."20 Despite a discernible revolt against the older generation, the
student radicals had come to inherit the worst features of the
older authoritarianism, exaggerating it until it acquired a menacing
new form. Throughout the student associations, the dueling
fraternities, and the social clubs, too, Young detected an illiberal inheritance
that boded ill for the health of a democratic political life. In
German schools, Young concluded, "the spirit of toleration, of
compromise, and of the personal respect owed to those who may think
differently from us on honest grounds, is not a popular or inborn
instinct."21 It was undoubtedly through Rosenstock-Huessy that Young
first made connection with the most dynamic of the German youth
leaders, Hans Dehmel, and came to see the potential of the
reconstructed youth movement. In Silesia, Dehmel and Rosenstock-Huessy
created a hostel and center for adult education, the Boberhaus,
that became a model for similar educational ventures throughout
Germany and Central Europe. Young himself spent time at the
Boberhaus and described it in a log of his travels:
The experience of the life and conversations here proved
most enlightening. It is an experiment to convert Lower
Silesia into a cultural unit for eastern Germany. Trade union
workmen, peasants, and students are associated for three
weeks in common activities and resultant discussions. One of
the many objects is to set University education in a more
sympathetic light and to secure its better appreciation.
Another is to keep the population on the soil and to cultivate
them while they cultivate it. It is conducted by Prof. Rosenstock
of
Breslau, a practical economist, and one of our Lincoln
helpers, and by Hans Dehmel, perhaps the most important of
the leaders of young Germany, whom the Lincoln Stiftung
is enabling this year to complete his education and so secure
a firmer footing for his wide activities.23
When Dehmel received one of the first Lincoln Stiftung
fellowships he had been working uninterruptedly for eight years to
reunify the German youth movement. Along with Ernst Buske he
had re-created the Deutsche Freischar, the largest and most successful
of the Free German or independent youth movement organizations
in the Weimar years. From his Silesian base Dehmel sought to
involve students, farmers, and workers in experimental "working
camps" that provided useful day labor coupled with evening classes
and social activities. Not only did these camps provide an outlet for
the unemployed or the restless, but Dehmel and his youth
movement colleagues sought to overcome the barriers of class, religion,
and ideology that were increasingly dividing German youth into
warring camps in the 1920s. This nonpartisan and democratic
tone brought Dehmel and Rosenstock-Huessy to the attention of
political and educational leaders in Berlin. For his part, Young saw in
the Silesian work camps and the youth movement an ideal marriage
of theory and practice, of idealism and action. "The new
movement adopts a far more practical and praiseworthy principle [than
the prewar youth movement, the Wandervögel]," Young wrote. "It
seeks to teach a judicial attitude of mind towards even political
questions, and a habit of handling them detachedly and impersonally
upon their own merits. . . . It preaches respect for an opponent . . .
presumably, likewise inspired by honorable and patriotic
motives."24 Although far from perfect, this wing of the youth movement
seemed to Young much more likely to create a spirit of democratic
citizenship than the universities or the public schools. That assessment
in itself might be taken as one of the most damning, if unspoken,
parts of Young's indictment of the German educational system.
The ALS and Weimar Educational Theory
Given his criticism of Germany's restrictive school system and
his own career in Britain, it is not surprising to find that Young was
intensely interested in Weimar Germany's educational
reformers. German pedagogical debates were especially intense in 1920s, a
product of the ideological and political upheaval of the time and the
work of Weimar Republic leaders such as Becker to broaden access to
education. In fact, many of the now unfamiliar names on the list of
ALS advisers turn out to be German educators, no small number of
whom, like Rosenstock-Huessy, might be called part of Weimar
Germany's "counter-culture." These educators were radically at odds with
German educational hierarchies and the university's seemingly
single-minded pursuit of specialization and rationality.
As one of its first fellows the Abraham Lincoln Stiftung chose
a Catholic priest, Ludwig Baum, who sought to imitate the
English public boarding schools. Baum, like many of the ALS fellows,
had served at the front during World War I and had been active in
the youth movement. Following three years of active duty Baum
studied for the priesthood in Bonn and threw himself into social work
in the Catholic workers' movement. When the ALS discovered him
in 1927, he had just opened his boarding school at Hellerau,
near Dresden. There, according to the ALS's biographical file, Baum
attempted "to put into practice a synthesis of fundamental
Christian doctrine and tradition with the finest ideals of the German
youth movement."25 In his own words, Baum aimed to "free the
education of our Catholic youth from its limitations" and instill a "deeper
understanding and sympathy for other
nations."26Young himself added a note on the biographical sketch forwarded to New York,
declaring Baum "a remarkable man" who possessed the "personal
simplicity and gaiety of St.
Francis."27
Unique though his personality may have been, Baum's
selection as one of its earliest fellows illustrated the Lincoln
Stiftung's commitment to educational innovation and the connection
between educational reform and the youth movement. Another educator
and school founder, Fritz Klatt, served first as a consultant or
"talent scout" before the ALS's directors decided that his own
impecunious work merited financial subsidy. Klatt, a prominent figure in the
youth movement and an educational theorist, burned with an almost
mystical faith in the necessity for individual self-development or
Bildung. Before the war Klatt had tramped with the Wandervögel and
studied art history. He fought at the front line and was severely
wounded; always introspective, his war experiences intensified his search for
personal meaning. After the war his loyalty to the youth
movement's ideals and his dissatisfaction with the existing educational
system took a practical turn.
By that time Klatt had formed very definite ideas about
education. Highly individualistic himself - one suspects he fit badly
into the prewar Prussian schools with their insistence on a rigidly
structured curriculum and severe discipline - Klatt reasoned that
because every person was unique, his or her training should vary
accordingly. In 1921 Klatt founded his own adult education school
and hostel in a sleepy Pomeranian town near the Baltic to put his
ideas into practice. Klatt himself gave lectures on art, poetry, and
philosophy to "young men of very varied professions and from all
classes of society."28
Klatt's experiment brought him some attention and
notoriety. "The ALS took up his case on grounds that they saw in him a
rare type of educational leader," the ALS's file on Klatt confides,
"one whose reactions from present social conditions have not merely
resulted in negative criticism, but have led him to concrete and
constructive action, contributing to new forms of corporate
living."29 Some idea of his success came from the Nazis themselves: In
1933 they closed the school.
Perhaps the most remarkable, and undoubtedly the most
influential, of the German educators whom Young came to know
was Kurt Hahn, whose path in life would soon come to parallel
Young's. Before turning to education Hahn had pursued a successful
political and administrative career. Hahn rose to the top of the
German civil service in the years before the war, and during wartime he
served in the German Foreign Office as an interpreter of British public
opinion. As Germany neared the end of the disastrous war Hahn threw
in his lot with Prince Max of Baden, who became the head of the
provisional government. As an aide to Prince Max in this transitional
regime, Hahn played an important role behind the scenes, meeting
secretly with Allied diplomats to negotiate an end to the war.
The crisis of 191819 seems to have slaked Hahn's thirst for
public office. Following the disastrous interregnum in which the
Allied powers largely rebuffed overtures from Prince Max's weak
government, Hahn withdrew from the public realm. The failures of
Imperial Germany and the painful transition to the Weimar Republic
convinced Hahn that postwar Germany required leadership of a new
sort, and beginning his second career as an educator he set out
self-consciously to train both intellect and character. In the salmon
and ochre colored buildings of the former monastery of Salem
am Bodensee, Hahn launched his educational experiment with
Prince Max's children as his first charges. Although he would later be
celebrated for his contributions to German democracy, in 1919
Hahn struck many observers as distinctly aristocratic in his approach
to educational problems. Arnold Brecht, who had worked closely
with Hahn during the war years and who knew him well during
this period, later recalled that Hahn's educational
ideas were elitist. According to Brecht, the courtly Hahn sought to educate leaders
first and foremost.30 Although Hahn supported the Weimar Republic,
he clearly viewed it as an imperfect regime but one preferable to the
alternatives. Hahn therefore was the embodiment of
the Vernunftrepublikaner, the less than whole-hearted democrats
who supported the new regime with their heads but not their hearts.
Hahn's ideas, however, found a perfect resonance with
Young. He had been struggling for years to put into words and practice
his own dissatisfaction with the English boarding school and its
emphasis on the playing field. Young, to be sure, did not object
to athleticism as such: Although a thoughtful educator and a
reflective man of letters, he freely admitted his love for rough games and
outdoor activities. But what Young found missing in his own
experience and in the German schools he visited as well was an educational
practice that balanced intellectual rigor with vigorous physical
activity - which personal experience had taught Young that boys needed - in
a setting that provided an educational purpose to all the events
outside the classroom. Hahn did not see the excursions he organized for
his charges as a momentary diversion from schooling but as part of
a carefully constructed curriculum of experiences destined to
shape character and emphasize creativity and leadership. For Young,
Hahn achieved a near-perfect harmonization of two very different
educational goals, high German academic standards with the English
public school's emphasis on character development.
Young's embrace of Hahn's methods and their common
understanding that the virtues of aristocratic ideals of self
development must not be lost in a democratic age helped shape the
Englishman's vision of what the Lincoln Stiftung should, and might, achieve.
Disdainful of vocational and mass education, Young shared Hahn's conviction that a handful of educational reformers and idealists
could create exactly the sort of leaders modern Germany needed - and
that traditional channels seemed designed to exclude or stunt. In
the composition of its advisory board and its selection of its first
fellows, the ALS sided with the experimentalists and the visionaries.
Organization of the Lincoln Stiftung
In retrospect it is Young's perceptive criticism of the defects of
German educational organization and his commentary on the
distemper of the times that first seize attention, but for Young the
business at hand was the more positive task of finding a way in which
American philanthropy might aid these forward-looking German
educators. And the latter were not yet in retreat: In particular, Young
had been heartened by the liberal outlook of the Prussian minister
of education, Carl Heinrich Becker, and by the experimental
attitude of Reinhold Schairer, the director of Germany's student aid
society, the Studienstiftung. Exactly how the idea of creating an entirely
new, private German foundation emerged from Young's
conversations with these leaders is not clear, but when Young submitted his
report to Woods and Ruml in late October 1926, the heart of his study
was a recommendation that the memorial support an imaginative
scheme designed to introduce a measure of voluntaryism into a system
that was still authoritarian and inherently rigid.
In contrast to the centralized state ministries and their
formal procedures, Young proposed to use the American funds for an
experiment with a more dispersed or decentralized search for
talented individuals conducted by a purely private foundation. He
challenged the German administrators to contrast their system with "a
scheme which based its search for personalities upon personal and
individual information."31 The new organization would depend on the type
of individual voluntary service characteristic of many British
and American charities and would rely on the "free collaboration"
of unpaid consultants, individuals who "could be trusted on their
own merits to understand its objects . . . and enter into its
spirit."32 The ALS would operate outside state institutions and guard its
independence from university or educational bureaucracies.
Some evidence of Young's success in launching the ALS is
provided by the list of prominent Germans who agreed to serve either as nominators or as members of the board of trustees. This
latter group, which Young persisted in calling the "presidential
committee," was chaired by Education Minister Becker. A
distinguished Orientalist, Becker directed the largest educational system in
Weimar Germany with a firm hand - and, a rarity among Weimar
professors, with a genuinely liberal outlook. A colleague in one of
these beleaguered coalition governments said of him that "even if
everything Becker did had been wrong . . . still Prussia had not had
a better minister of culture for over a
century."33Becker merited this praise for the way in which he ran the Prussian state
educational system with a determination to expand educational
opportunities at all levels. His democratic inclinations led him to revise the
admissions procedures of the Prussian universities, prying them open
to candidates who did not have the classical education previously
required. Becker also used his power of appointment to promote
professors more sympathetic to the Weimar Republic than the
majority who, as Young had put it in his report to the memorial, were
"reactionary, both in their politics and their views of contemporary
life."34
In addition to Becker, the remaining members of the board
included a carefully balanced list of political and cultural figures.
The treasurer, Albert Dufour-Feronce, was a German diplomat who
had only recently been elected by the League of Nations to serve as
one of its permanent undersecretaries. The remaining members
were unlikely bedfellows: Heinrich Simon, a liberal publisher who
directed the influential Frankfurter
Zeitung; a much more conservative publisher, Eugen Diederichs of Jena; the philanthropist and
industrialist Robert Bosch of Stuttgart (who would later play a key role in
the German resistance, providing funds to Carl Goerdeler); another
industrialist, Carl Duisberg of I.G. Farben; and Georg
Kerschensteiner of Munich, one of Germany's leading educational philosophers.
Young and the German organizers - principally Becker,
Simons, and Schairer - never intended to hand any real duties to this
board, except perhaps those of fund-raising. Its primary function seems
to have been entirely symbolic as a guarantee of the plan's
representative quality and its broadly nonpartisan character. A second
purpose, to judge by the assurances Young relayed to Woods and
the Rockefeller trustees in New York, may have been to defend the
Lincoln Stiftung from possible charges of undue American influence
in German cultural affairs. Schairer credited Young with insisting "that
the first condition was the formation of a purely German
presidential committee who should administer the scheme not as the
trustees of a foreign enterprise, but as the guardians of a national
undertaking."35 Young himself wrote, in a supplementary report on
the Lincoln Stiftung's first year of operation, that this group of
prominent Germans had been created less to function as a board of
trustees with real executive powers than as "a protective screen . . .
whose names should secure the fund from press criticism or political
pressure." The committee, Young reported with satisfaction in 1930,
had met only twice and gave every sign that it would "remain
protectively and usefully inactive, except when questions of finance
or fundamental problems of extension and the like
arise."36 Finally, to guarantee that the committee should not play too active a role,
the organization's bylaws stipulated that no member of the
presidential committee could take part in the deliberations of the
fellowship committee or make recommendations on the Lincoln Stiftung's
decisions to support individual candidates.
No less remarkable than the notables who served as
honorary trustees were the Vertrauensleute or consultants whom
Becker, Schairer, and Simons convinced to serve (without pay) as
advisers or "talent scouts" for the new organization. In his report to the
memorial, Young had spoken of the need to recruit the "live
wires" among Weimar intellectuals, and his claim that the Lincoln
Stiftung had done so clearly was no idle boast. A document
accompanying Young's memorandum to the memorial describing the formation
of the ALS in 1927 listed the names of 101 prominent Germans, of
whom the majority were active defenders of the Weimar Republic and
leading figures in the country's intellectual life (see Appendix 1).
Nearly a quarter of these advisers were civil service administrators,
many of them serving as Becker's colleagues in the educational and
cultural ministries of Prussia, Saxony, and other German states.
In addition to this group of more-or-less "official"
representatives of the German educational establishment, there were no
less than ten members of the Reichstag and the chief judge of the
supreme court, Walter Simons, whose son Hans was, as noted, one
of the ALS's directors. Among the political figures were Willy
Hellpach, the presidential candidate of the Democrats in 1925; and
Anton Erkelenz, Carl Severing, and Wilhelm Sollmann, the latter two
prominent members of the Social Democratic Party. Among the political
figures serving as advisers the Lincoln Stiftung included the
feminists Gertrud Bäumer, Alice Salomon, and Helene Weber.
Whereas the Lincoln Stiftung's list of advisers was weighted left of center,
it also displayed a conscious effort to include the full spectrum of
political opinion in Weimar Germany. Thus, in addition to the
prominent leftist and pacifist intellectuals, the ALS's network of
advisers included numerous members of the Catholic Center Party
(Zentrum). The ALS also succeeded in recruiting leading figures from the
Right, including such prominent conservative spokesmen as the
legal scholar Carl Schmitt and Nationalist Party spokesman
Otto Hoetzsch.
The largest single group - composed of some forty-five or
more names - were academics, generally of a much more liberal
disposition than the professoriate at large. Beyond the ranks of the
parliamentarians, civil servants, and other representatives of
"official" Germany, Young recruited an array of artists and literary
figures who he hoped would counterbalance the ALS's inherent bias
toward academic figures. Foremost among these independent
intellectual figures was Thomas Mann, although it must be added
that there is no evidence that the great novelist ever played an
active role in the selection of candidates or even that he nominated
one. The Lincoln Stiftung's artists included Käthe Kollwitz and
sculptor Georg Kolbe, the dramatist Kurt Tucholsky, film director
Paul Wegener, and, from the Weimar theater, Leopold Jessner. There
also were a number of writers and editors on the board, including
Karl Vossler, Ludwig von Ficker, travel writer Leo Matthias, and,
from the Stefan George circle, Ludwig Klages. A writer more staunchly
to the left, Walter Hammer, later played an active role in the resistance.
The ALS also boasted a small but distinguished number of
scientists. The Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber agreed to serve as
a consultant, as did naturalist Friedrich Dessauer. Two liberal
Protestant theologians, Paul Tillich and Richard Kroner, took an interest
in the ALS's nominations, and the list of nominators also included
the church historian Georg Schreiber, a prominent Catholic lay
leader who served as the Zentrum party's spokesman on educational
questions affecting the universities.
By no means were all of these advisory board members
active participants, and it is clear that Young and the German
directors sought to keep the more politically involved members at arm's length from the selection process. Some time after the initial report of
the ALS's formation was sent to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1927,
the directors found it necessary to add new nominators.
Unfortunately, there is no list comparable to the one compiled in 1927, so that
the only indication of the newly expanded circle of nominators for
the Lincoln Stiftung's later phase comes from a list of candidates
compiled in 1930. This document names some 133
Kandidaten or nominees who were under serious consideration and also indicates
which advisers made the nominations. This imperfect list, containing
the names of so many new advisers not on the earlier lists, suggests
that any complete roster of Vertrauensleute in 1930 would bear only a
slight resemblance to the original list of 1927. The list of 1930 reveals
some surprising additions to the ranks of the "talent scouts,"
including such luminaries as Hermann Hesse, Marianne Weber, and
Albert Einstein.
Thus, although there is no record that Thomas Mann ever
took an active interest in the ALS's search for new talent, Hermann
Hesse sent in the names of actress and writer Emmy Ball-Hennings
and her daughter Annemarie Ball. Max Weber's widow, Marianne
Weber, was an even more active participant, and she proved to have
an excellent eye for talent. Whereas it is probable that she
suggested even more names, the list of candidates included four of her
nominees, and of these two received financial aid. The
philosopher Raymond Klibansky, one of her choices, later emigrated to
Great Britain, where he was associated with the Warburg Institute.
Another fellow active in her Heidelberg circle, Eduard Baumgarten,
translated Dewey's works into German and survived the Hitler years
to play an active role in the reconstruction of the German universities.
The First Class of Fellows of the Lincoln Stiftung
The first fellows selected by the newly created German
foundation came from a number of fields, but, perhaps not surprisingly
given Young's canvas of German educational leaders and the spirit of
the Locarno years, the majority of the fellows were distinguished
by their involvement in international reconciliation, educational
reform, or the German youth movement (see Appendix 2). The
educators Klatt and Baum, youth movement leader Dehmel, and
scholars Baumgarten and Klibansky have already been mentioned. Others in this first class of selectees included Elisabeth Rotten, who
had worked with English prisoners of war during World War I;
Maria Sevenich, a leader of Catholic women's groups in the Rhineland
and a future member of the Bundestag; international law
specialist Heinrich Rogge; psychologists Karl Duncker and August
Vetter; philosophers Heinrich Hellmund and Albert Dietrich; an art
historian, Herman Goern; the marine geologist Albert Schwarz, who
tragically would die young; the naturalist and veterinary medicine
specialist Bernhard Grzimek, who would go on to play a leading role
in international wildlife preservation efforts; political scientist
Theodor Eschenburg; social scientist Alfred Sohn-Rethel; the writer
Hans Queling; and youth movement leaders Fritz Skurnia,
Hermann Lange, August Rathmann, and Rudolf Schubert.
When the Lincoln Stiftung issued its first report in 1930 it
summarized the careers and work of this group of individuals.
Consequently, this first cohort of twenty-two is the best-documented
set of Lincoln Stiftung fellows. Of these twenty-two selections, it is
striking to note that at least twelve had participated in the youth
movement, usually in some leadership role. Of the men, at least nine
had served on the front lines during the war, and one, Klatt, had
been seriously wounded. A number - Klatt, Baum, Vetter, Rathmann,
and Skurnia - were especially concerned with problems of education
for workers and other adults who fell outside the formal
educational system. Despite the range of interests covered by this first class
of fellows, the ALS directors heard complaints from their
consultants that these selections did not range far enough and that, for such
an experimental operation, there were too many academics
destined for university careers. Young added a personal note suggesting
that the Lincoln Stiftung also needed a permanent secretary, the
beginnings of an administrative office, to keep in touch with the
network of consultants and the expanding group of fellows whose
careers the ALS should track. Just as it was developing its own
administrative machinery, however, the Lincoln Stiftung's distant patron
was completely transforming its own.
Reorganization of the Rockefeller Philanthropies
In 1928 the various Rockefeller philanthropies were reorganized,
and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial's programs in the social sciences and the humanities were incorporated into those of
the Rockefeller Foundation - a change that would seriously affect the
Lincoln Stiftung. The newly consolidated foundation emphasized
advanced scholarly research along disciplinary lines ranging from
the physical sciences to the humanities. The difficulties in fitting the
older programs of the memorial into the revised programs of the
foundation were especially evident in the case of the Lincoln
Stiftung.37
Having inherited Young and the Lincoln Stiftung from the
memorial, the officials of the Rockefeller Foundation hardly knew
what to make of their bequest. Edward Capps, an American classicist
who was charged with developing a program in the humanities, saw
no place for the ALS in the foundation's future work. When Young
set out the memorial's previous interests in the humanities in the
form of a seven-page memorandum, Capps responded coolly. "The
guiding principle of the Foundation as at present organized is the
advancement of knowledge through research," he told Young.
"This statement of purpose, therefore, would automatically exclude
such an activity as you have established in the Lincoln Stiftung, in
which your objective was the 'discovery of the original or humane
mind' in Germany."38
To further the administrative confusion the foundation's
president, George E. Vincent, retired in 1929 and was replaced by a
scientist-mathematician, Max Mason, who showed much less
sympathy for the humanities and the rather freewheeling ways of his
European consultant. Whereas Vincent had delighted in trips to
the foundation's office in Paris and in long conversations with
Young, Mason had little patience for the seemingly endless discussions
that the humanities entailed. Foundation officials in Paris
recommended that the Lincoln Stiftung be turned over entirely to its German
directors with a notice that they would have to find alternative
sources of funds, perhaps after a final Rockefeller grant.
But just as the Rockefeller Foundation was preparing to
withdraw its support, the Lincoln Stiftung was began to attract
wider attention from German officials. In December 1929 Young had
journeyed to Berlin to meet Becker and other members of the ALS's
board of directors in the education minister's offices. There, on the
evening of December 14, the directors summoned several of their star
pupils for a conference with Becker and other Prussian officials. Young
made an opening statement on the origins of the educational foundation,
and then several of the ALS fellows spoke on the effects of the
Weimar Republic's various educational reforms.
In his diary Young noted that this conference had also
interested the German Ministry of the Interior as well as the educational
hierarchy. Young recorded the participation of Carl Severing, the
Reich minister of the interior and the chief minister of Prussia, as
follows: "A dramatic incident was the entry of Minister Severing three
hours late at the end of a cabinet meeting which had lasted two days,
during which time he had saved parliamentary government in
Germany, and incidentally avoided being appointed himself dictator
by Hindenburg. He was naturally fatigued, but took part in our
discussions for the remainder of a long
evening."39 Severing had indeed been involved in protracted cabinet meetings concerning
the ruling coalition's increasingly weak hold on the country, and
the presence of one of the principal political figures of the day at a
time when political infighting was intense was an indication of success.
In a second and fuller account sent to the Rockefeller
Foundation, Young wrote that Severing's brief remarks included a
promise to contribute 20,000 marks to the ALS's budget for 1930. In
explaining the interest of so pressed and busy a politician in the
Lincoln Stiftung, Young was perhaps not unrealistic: "It seems clear that
he saw in the ALS a new opportunity for discovering and
influencing opinion in many social sectors not usually reached, a kind of
vertical register . . . composed of very able men drawn from many
classes, which could be consulted with profit as one might read the
markings on a thermometer outside the
window."40
The decision of the German government to back the
Lincoln Stiftung represented a major accomplishment for Young,
Schairer, and Simons. No doubt it was in large measure due to some
unseen prompting from Becker, whose collaboration with Severing and
the embattled moderates in the Prussian cabinet was close during
these months. And, to be sure, Severing had cause for worry about
German youth; with the depression deepening and
unemployment mounting, extremist groups were gaining ground daily. In the
end, the Lincoln Stiftung's success, like Severing's in the cabinet,
was short-lived; the moment of their success coincided with the
beginnings of the Weimar Republic's death throes.
However, to the Rockefeller Foundation officials at the time,
the ability of the ALS to enlist new sources of support in the midst of a
severe depression constituted a strong argument for giving it
additional support. By the summer of 1930 Mason was persuaded
that the Lincoln Stiftung should not be cast adrift just as it showed
signs of becoming self-supporting. When Mason and Thomas B.
Appleget, the foundation's vice president, visited the Paris office that
same summer they met with Young and Selskar M. "Mike" Gunn, the
head of the foundation's European operations, and quickly came to
an agreement to extend Rockefeller contributions for an additional
three years. Foundation officials abandoned the memorial's insistence
on anonymity and approved a plan to have Young serve the
remainder of his consultancy as full-time liaison between the Lincoln
Stiftung and the Rockefeller Foundation. Mason, Young, and Appleget
agreed that "if the experiment is successful, more and more
contributions will come from German
sources."41
Following the foundation's decision in June, Gunn and
Appleget traveled to Berlin in the following month to meet with the
Lincoln Stiftung's leadership. Encouraged by the renewed interest,
Becker and Schairer raised the possibility of increasing the stakes in
this gamble. Suggesting that the Americans commit their
organization to a pledge of $50,000, they optimistically estimated that they
could raise half that amount from German sources. At the end of a
further trial period, with these expanded revenues, the ALS would
undoubtedly be in a position to demonstrate its
worth.42
As it turned out, however, the Lincoln Stiftung's
optimism proved premature. By the time the two Americans returned to
Berlin, the Weimar coalition had lost its tenuous hold on power
and they found that Severing's replacement at the ministry did not
share the Social Democrat's interest in educational experiments.
"The Minister," Appleget's diary explains, "announces for the first
time that the subventions previously granted by the German
government must now be discontinued and enlarges upon the difficult
German economic situation." Gunn, who no doubt had been involved in
similar negotiations before, responded that the Rockefeller
Foundation "could never be the sole source of support of any enterprise"
and expressed the foundation's desire to see "other contributions . .
. forthcoming."43
Despite these setbacks the Rockefeller Foundation was
now determined to support the ALS and to offer it one final chance
to prove itself to its German backers. Gunn and Appleget agreed that,
if nothing else, the Lincoln Stiftung represented an interesting
experiment and might serve as a "control group" in comparison
with the foundation's fellowship program. Thus, even in the absence
of an agreement by the German government to live up to
Severing's pledge, the two Rockefeller officials agreed to push for a renewal
of the foundation's support. Interestingly, they agreed to
recommend $60,000, an even larger sum than the Germans had requested. But
to reinforce the point that the foundation hoped to see the
Lincoln Stiftung become entirely supported by German funds, they
proposed to have the foundation's grant taper off over a four-year period,
each annual installment becoming progressively
smaller.44
Shortly after Gunn and Appleget decided to continue with
the Lincoln Stiftung project, word arrived from Germany that the
government had relented. Although the subvention from Berlin
was trimmed in half - to 10,000 marks - it was nonetheless a victory
for the ALS and, perhaps, for Gunn, too. Schairer, who directed a
national student service organization, wrote Gunn to explain that
his own organization's budget had been trimmed by over 600,000
marks: "In this situation you will understand that the contribution to
the Abraham Lincoln Stiftung is also
shortened."45
Appleget returned to New York in the autumn of 1930
convinced of the need to give the Lincoln Stiftung a decisive boost. At a
meeting with Mason and the principal officers of the foundation he
argued that the earlier role played by the Rockefeller office and
the prominence of the Germans who had by then become involved
with the ALS dictated further support. Although Appleget conceded
that the entire project was far removed from the Rockefeller
Foundation's new orientation toward basic research, he thought the work of
the ALS too valuable to be abandoned lightly. The support promised
by the German government constituted another important
argument. From a variety of sources it seemed evident that the Lincoln
Stiftung had succeeded in its initial efforts and that it was conducting
activities that had received enthusiastic backing from Becker and
other German educators. On balance, Appleget thought that the
previous grants had been too small to accomplish Young's original
scheme, and the minutes of the meeting record his judgment that these
previous grants of $10,000 per year were "ridiculously small for
the size of the machinery and the number of good applications
reported." In sum, Appleget now recommended a large appropriation of $85,000 to be spread over six years in diminishing payments. Such a
plan would bestow a "decent gift" on the Rockefeller offspring and
also would give the German backers ample time to weather the
depression and raise funds locally.46
The extended discussion over continuing support to the
ALS was finally brought to an end by the trustees in December 1930.
Although the trustees allowed themselves to be persuaded that a
grant was in order to achieve a "definite but still courteous
withdrawal,"47 there were apparently many reservations about, and perhaps
even opposition to, the plan Appleget had formulated. In the end,
the foundation's trustees decided to cut the proposal virtually in
half and award the ALS an additional $45,000 spread over four years
in the following manner: 1931: $15,000; 1932: $15,000; 1933:
$10,000; 1934: $5,000. By cutting the total and by scheduling the payments
in this fashion, the foundation clearly intended to put the Germans
on notice that they would have to find additional sources of
funding by the end of 1932.
Writing to Gunn in Paris, Appleget summarized the
sentiment at the meeting: "I think that the final action may be considered as
a compromise between our feeling that the project should have
further trial on a more adequate basis . . . and the feeling of the
trustees that, in view of the impossibility of weighing the imponderable
considerations presented, the Foundation should, as soon as it could
in all justice to our German friends, leave the
project."48 Although this decision fell far short of Young's and Schairer's hopes, given
both the doubts of the trustees and the initial hostility of the president,
it was undoubtedly the best outcome they could have obtained.
The Crisis of 1933
The issue of additional Rockefeller support for the ALS became
critical in 1933. In February, less than a month after Hitler's
designation as chancellor, Hans Simons met with one of the foundation's
representatives in Paris, John Van Sickle, to emphasize the importance
of the German agency's work. Although the Rockefeller
Foundation's grant would not expire until the end of 1934, the ALS's
directors could already feel the pinch of the decision made in 1930 to
taper payments. The German directors were convinced, however, that
they had a case to make for further support. Simons, according to Van Sickle's notes, "cited one case after another of men of
exceptional promise who, through help at a critical point, have been saved
from disaster or a futile existence and brought to secure positions in
which they will make real
contributions."49 Ironically, Simons himself
had just been fired by the new regime and Van Sickle reported his
pessimistic estimate that "a number of years will elapse before he
can return to public life."50 Although he had just been a victim of
political pressure, Simons nonetheless argued that the Lincoln
Stiftung would be able, as it had in the past, to place its candidates.
This latter argument was repeated even after the Nazi purge
of the civil service and the dismissals of Jewish professors in April
1933. Throughout 1933 the directors of the ALS, and especially
Simons, who made no less than three visits to the Rockefeller
Foundation's office to plead his case, attempted to persuade the foundation
to reverse its decision. Despite Van Sickle's unambiguous
declaration in February that "further support was not to be
expected,"51 Simons and Young continued to hope that some additional aid could
be coaxed out of the foundation. Given the inability of the
Lincoln Stiftung to replace its governmental subsidies or to raise any
private German funds, a decision by the Rockefeller Foundation not
to renew its support would be tantamount to killing the organization.
Simons remained convinced that the ALS still had a role to
play in saving careers of "exceptional promise." To Tracy B.
Kittredge, another officer of the foundation who worked in Paris, he
made known his distress over the earlier rejection and argued with
evident conviction that the Lincoln Stiftung was the last remaining
hope for saving independent intellectual life in Germany. Kittredge
reported that "Dr. Simons . . . is convinced that under present
circumstances the Stiftung might be able to play a role of exceptional
importance if it could continue its work for a further period."
Kittredge added that Simons "pointed out that the hope of intellectual life
in Germany now rests definitely on men of the younger
generation."52
Precisely for that reason it was all the more imperative for
the Rockefeller Foundation to reconsider its stance and to give the
independent German foundation additional funds to carry on its
work. Simons offered an intriguing forecast of the months to come:
[T]he present regime is so solidly established that it is
bound to endure for a relatively long period. He feels that the
men of the older generation who have been definitely labelled
as social democrats or as liberal intellectuals will play very
little role in the future of German intellectual development.
Many of them will go into exile, and of those who remain in
Germany few will be able to exercise much influence. He
feels that those who have rallied to the regime will, on the
whole, have less influence than those who have held aloof.
On the other hand, Dr. S[imons] feels that the
experience of the last six months shows quite definitely that there
will be a very important modification in the movement
itself through the influence of the stronger intellectuals among
the youth who make up the party. About half of the former
beneficiaries of the ALS have become party members. In so
doing, Dr. S[imons] feels that they have not abandoned in
the least their own intellectual independence or the
possibility of contributing to the future of German culture.
S[imons] feels that in the future the forms and
methods of intellectual expression will be different than in the
past, but he has no reason to believe that in the long run the
German intellectual tradition will not be maintained. For
this reason he is convinced that if in addition to supporting for
a further period of one or two years certain men now
receiving grants, the Stiftung could also make a number of
new grants, that it might make a very significant contribution
to the future of German thought.53
Although Kittredge warned Simons that the Rockefeller
Foundation would be curtailing its programs in Germany and that
he could not give the ALS official any encouragement, the wording
of his reply may have in fact done so. Kittredge told Simons that
there was only a "very small prospect" of further support, but given
the categorical reply from Van Sickle in February this answer
sounded much less final.54
Consequently, Simons and Young made yet another
concerted effort in November to reopen the ALS question. The various
diary entries and memoranda suggest that they had a sympathetic
audience in the Paris-based officers of the foundation. Both
Kittredge and Van Sickle were well informed about the dismissals and
Nazi persecution of intellectuals and political opponents, and the
possibility of funding an organization seemingly free from state
control must have appealed strongly to the foundation's
representatives. Despite the repeated and often categorically negative responses,
the persistence of these conversations and the sympathetic tone of
Paris office memoranda suggest that the Rockefeller Foundation did,
in fact, give these last-minute appeals serious
consideration.55
From London Young wrote that although it had been
possible to place half of the ALS fellows in once secure jobs, "because of
the political changes in Germany, even the results already obtained
are now endangered. . . . Positions offered to the A. L. St. for its
members have been occupied by members of the governing
German party."56 But in the same breath Young and Simons argued with
some ingenuity that the Lincoln Stiftung offered the last remaining
hope to transform the new regime in Germany. "Both Young and
Simons feel that it is of the greatest importance to help men of
character they are interested in to remain in Germany," Van Sickle
summarized one discussion held in November 1933. "Such men will
not occupy leading places," Simons and Young conceded to Van
Sickle, "but they will be an important element in liberalizing the
Regime once the first excesses of the revolution are
over."57
Nothing better reveals this hopeful estimate of the possible
"liberalizing" effects of the Lincoln Stiftung experiment than a
curious report forwarded by Young to the Rockefeller Foundation. Two
of the ALS fellows had rendered signal services to the Reich
Labor Ministry by organizing adult education programs in the
state-run labor camps. Of one of these fellowship recipients, an expert in
adult education who had received ALS funds to travel abroad and
study in the years prior to the Nazi takeover, it was claimed that
without this stipend he would never have come to the attention of the
new government bureau. That this might be an ambiguous blessing
in 1933 did not deter the officials of the Lincoln Stiftung from
pointing to this particular case as an outstanding example of their success
in placing promising younger men into positions of leadership.
"We provided a salary and put him at the disposal of the Social
Ministry of the Reich [Reichsarbeitsdienst]," the officials of the ALS wrote
(in Young's translation): "Owing to his efficient guidance, the
working camps are now no longer confined to manual labor and
training, but are becoming more and more centres of valuable adult
education."58 That this Fabian strategy was pursued actively - and not in one
or two cases only - is attested to by other documents. Young's report
cited a second fellow, Hans Raupach, as an example of the successful
penetration of the party's counsels by men of a more liberal
disposition. Described as the "official adviser of a provincial headquarters" of
the National Socialist party, Simons and Schairer still believed Raupach
to be at heart on the side of the angels. An important youth
movement leader, and Dehmel's successor as director of the Boberhaus, the
Lincoln Stiftung's leaders credited this expert on agrarian problems
with "supporting German youth in its struggle against the more
military forms of its present organization." A third fellow had "studied the
methods of conducting intelligence tests developed in the USA" but
"was unable to find any work after his return." With the backing of the
ALS he had helped the Saxon provincial government develop tests,
based on the latest American social science methodology, for assessing
likely university applicants. Because the new government proposed to
restrict admissions, the work of this fellow had an immediate
relevance and his tests were welcomed by the authorities in Dresden. Thanks
to these techniques, the directors reported, the Saxon government
"should reduce the numbers of university students by
half."59
Simons seems to have devised a tactic that succeeded in
placing those Lincoln Stiftung fellows who were so inclined into
government bureaucracies. The memorandum summarizing his
conversation with Van Sickle in November 1933 explains the technique:
Simons particularly stresses . . . that many men can be
assured of secure positions of great usefulness in Germany,
in public service, if - for a period of six months to a
year - the salaries attached to their offices can be defrayed from
non-governmental sources. As long as it is known that the
displacing of such a man will not open the way for a Nazi in
better standing, there will be no pressure to put him out. After
he has been there for a short time it will be comparatively easy
to provide for him from government funds: his position will
be taken for granted. If the Nazi higher up is in favor of the
man, he will be able to work him into the
system.60
Or, put more simply, ALS grants bought temporary places
for several fellows, including the two youth leaders who volunteered
for work with the Reich Labor Service. Although hindsight makes
it easier to see that the question of who was using whom was far
from answered, in 1933 Simons seems to have persuaded Van Sickle
that he and the Stiftung had found a way around the politicization of
the civil service and one that might ultimately help liberalize
the government's policies.
Young and Simons recognized that such a course of action
posed some risks, and indeed they seem to have been worried about
the careers of several of the fellows whose "high intellectual and
moral standards" were already bringing them into conflict with the
new regime. "We wish to support existing members of the A.L.St.
who cannot continue their research or their practical work without
joining the 'Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei' against
their convictions, and thereby giving up the essential value of their
individual contribution to the human
cause."61 Ironically, for an
organization that had attempted to be nonpartisan and that had
constructed elaborate safeguards against political interference from Weimar
political parties, the Lincoln Stiftung now found its officers,
fellows, and advisers enmeshed in political considerations.
On the American side the decision on the fate of the ALS
formed part of a larger policy debate within the Rockefeller Foundation
about whether it should continue to have a role in Germany and, if
so, what the best course of action should be. By the spring of 1933
the foundation's office in Europe was painfully aware of the extent
of Nazi anti-intellectualism and xenophobia. Following the first
anti-Semitic decrees by the Hitler government ousting hundreds of
Jewish professors and scientists from their posts, the foundation's
office in Paris found itself inundated with appeals for aid. Foundation
officials also heard contradictory advice about how best to help
and widely divergent assessments of the long-term impact of the
new regime. The foundation's German fellowship advisers, fearing a
complete withdrawal of American funds, took an optimistic stance
and predicted that the disruptions caused by the dismissals of 1933
would not last long. Van Sickle and Kittredge, the program officers in
Paris responsible for the social sciences, hoped that the foundation
might be able to resume its normal operations. They and their
counterparts in the science programs of the Foundation heard similar
assessments from German educational authorities who stressed
the need for continued assistance during the emergency. Consequently,
they were sympathetic to arguments from the ALS that its
grants made independent intellectual life possible. The private nature
of the ALS strengthened its appeals to foundation officials because
in 1933 it appeared to be one of the few viable organizations in
Germany capable of continued operation.
This natural sympathy on the part of the Paris-based officers
of the Rockefeller Foundation for the German intellectuals with
whom they worked was offset, however, by the growing skepticism of
the foundation's trustees and senior officials in New York that the
philanthropy could continue to do business as usual in Germany.
The foundation very quickly moved to create effective programs for
refugee professors, and the trustees ordered the continuation of all
existing German grants to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. As
it became apparent that Nazi rule would not be temporary, and
that its dismissal policy was not an aberration but part of the new
regime's fundamental outlook, the foundation altered its operations in
Germany. Beginning with its cautious case-by-case approach in
the spring of 1933, the foundation's trustees reluctantly concluded
that intellectual repression precluded any further activity and in
1935 they ordered a halt to the Foundation's grant-making in
Germany.62
The decision on the Lincoln Stiftung, however, was made
well before this crucial turning point, and indeed the Foundation's
senior leadership studied the evolution of this small experiment
with keen interest as a clue to the changes in the intellectual climate
in Germany and as a test of the real possibility for any
independent organizational life under the Nazi regime. Appleget, the
foundation's vice president and the chief backer of the ALS in 1930, had
become convinced that the foundation could not do business as usual in
Nazi Germany. Although he might have been sympathetic to Young's
and Simons's efforts to support anti-Nazi fellows, Appleget did not
believe that the strategy outlined by the Lincoln Stiftung would
work. "The argument advanced, namely, that the L.S. will provide a
stimulation and training to the best of the young men in the Nazi
movement, is not particularly appealing," he recorded in his
diary.63
Appleget's judgment spelled the end of the ALS and its
remarkable experiment in carving out a greater role for private
institutions in the German educational system, an experiment that was
unique in Rockefeller and general American philanthropy at the time.
Although Simons and Young continued to appeal for support, the Rockefeller Foundation declined to provide any emergency
support or to make any supplemental award. With this decision, the
ALS came to an end in 1934. The following year, when Simons came
to New York to join the New School's University in Exile as a
refugee professor, even he was forced to concede that the foundation's
decision had been correct: Simons told John Marshall, the assistant
director for the humanities program, that there remained no
possibility for independent intellectual life in
Germany.64
Toward an Assessment of the Lincoln Stiftung
Sixty-five years later, how are we to evaluate the Abraham
Lincoln Stiftung? Appleget's conclusion that the ALS could not survive
and the jarring estimate in Kittredge's memorandum that half its
fellows had joined the National Socialists suggest a very negative
assessment by the Rockefeller Foundation's officers. Whether half the
Lincoln Stiftung either sympathized with or joined the Nazis cannot
be determined until the full roster of fellowship recipients can be
identified, but given the high number of émigrés among both the
fellows and the advisers, it seems doubtful that the majority of
the ALS fellows actively sympathized with National Socialism.
Nonetheless, it is clear that some - most notably, the
jurist Heinrich Rogge, the philosopher Albert Dietrich, and the
journalist Giselher Wirsing - actively endorsed the new regime's
nationalism. However, the majority of the Lincoln Stiftung fellows whose
careers I have been able to trace clearly did not join either the National
Socialists or participate in the party's organs. If we set aside (for
a moment) the question of political allegiance, a close reading of
the judgments expressed by foundation officials in 1930 and again
in 19334 suggests that they did not regard the experiment as a
complete failure. It would be more accurate to conclude that
the Rockefeller Foundation did not know how to evaluate this
unique entity and that as the American foundation ended its German
operations it began to view the issue - which, despite the ALS's
small size and limited scope, once engaged its presidents and
professional staff on both sides of the Atlantic in a lively debate - as irrelevant
to its newly defined programs.
Perhaps appropriately, the final word in this debate over the
Lincoln Stiftung's merit as a fellowship scheme came in 1937, when Reinhold Schairer published an evaluation in the British
Education Yearbook. Unlike the ALS's critics in the foundation, Schairer
judged the experiment to be a resounding success. He praised Young's
genius in seeing the need for such a private entity in Weimar
Germany and his remarkable personal skills in the successful creation of
the German foundation. On what basis did Schairer judge it a
success? First, Schairer implicitly agreed with Young's analysis of the
need for more private initiative in the German educational system,
and consequently he praised, almost in passing, Young and the ALS
for successfully implementing a flexible new scheme for awarding
fellowships and other forms of support. In a sense, Schairer seems
to have been arguing that the "principle of personal guidance and
individual discretion" was missing in German scholarship
programs - including, perhaps, the one he ran in Dresden - and, as a sign
of success, he cites (as Young had) the ALS's insistence on pairing
its candidates and fellows with individual mentors, an echo of the
British tutorial system.65
Schairer also asserted that the ALS had succeeded in
altering lives and careers for the better, and just as he and Simons had done
in their first report to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1930,
Schairer counted not only the relatively small number of stipend
recipients but also the much larger list of candidates who received only
advice or referrals. Most of the preliminary list of possible fellows,
Schairer added, needed no funds from the Lincoln Stiftung but only
assistance from existing sources. Nonetheless, by steering such talent into
the right channels, the new foundation provided a service not offered
by any existing agency. More verifiable evidence, of course, came
from the careers launched by, or saved by, the ALS's actual grants.
Schairer found a third value in the ALS's "social potential,"
that is, in its insistence that intellectual distinction be married to
public service and leadership activities. Although the roster of
Lincoln Stiftung fellows certainly demonstrates that a number of its
fellows went on to pursue distinguished academic careers, Schairer's
third standard of judgment was a much harder one to establish, and
his article in the Education Yearbook did not attempt to elaborate on
this point. Instead, Schairer pointed to Young's prescient earlier
reports and noted that, had the ALS had more time to work with the
Silesian labor camps and the adult education schools, it might have
offered German youth a much more powerful alternative than the nihilism
of the Nazi movement. Despite Schairer's enthusiasm for
Young's model, the Lincoln Stiftung found no imitators and soon faded
from view. The Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropies had
no intention of launching such experiments in the midst of a
global depression and in a Europe where nationalist sentiments were
reaching the boiling point.
Schairer's study does suggest at least one approach for the
historian: to look at the subsequent careers of the Lincoln Stiftung
fellows, and possibly those of the larger group of candidates who,
had more funds been available, might have been awarded
stipends. Unfortunately, the documentary evidence presents some
serious obstacles for historians with a statistical bent: The ALS did not
publish a final report (save for Schairer's article), and the
Rockefeller Foundation files contain confusing documents; of those
emanating from Germany, none seem to go beyond 1933. How the ALS
spent its few remaining funds in 1934 is unknown.
Even identifying the fellows of the ALS is difficult.
Schairer's 1937 article, for example, speaks of "about seventy" fellows
(or "members" as he and Young referred to the stipend
recipients).66 A retrospective assessment by Kittredge in 1935 notes that "of
approximately 70 cases . . . practically all had turned out
successfully."67 A note appended to a summary of the ALS's work at the beginning
of the Rockefeller files refers to "82 beneficiaries" between 1928
and 1933, but the source of this number seems to be a
memorandum from Young and Simons dated November 29,
1933.68
This latter document was itself an elaboration on an
earlier memorandum, containing the ALS's plea for one last grant to
supplement the meager sums available from the 1930 appropriation.
Writing from London in early November 1933, Young estimated that
the ALS had benefited approximately fifty young Germans, but
when he asked Schairer and Simons to bolster his case with a more
detailed assessment they produced a report, with valuable (but
incomplete) biographical details, that put the number of stipend
recipients at sixty-three. At the end of 1933, Schairer and Simons
reported, "Of these 63 members, 10 are still in need of the help and
guidance of the A.L.ST. With 5 exceptions, all the rest have been
definitely placed."69
Although it is possible that the ALS used its remaining $5,000
in 1934 to aid new recipients, it seems more likely that the German
administrators spent the remaining balance from the
Rockefeller Foundation's appropriation to address the needs of the ten to
fifteen fellows who still required assistance. This record of
placement is perhaps the standard by which Kittredge and Van Sickle
judged the ALS: During the depression years from 1929 to 1933 they
were painfully aware of the poor prospects for many of the
Rockefeller Foundation's own fellowship recipients in the social and
natural sciences. Using employment as the measure of success, the
Fabian strategy of the ALS may indeed have surpassed the
foundation's prestigious fellowship program.
Given the absence (in the Rockefeller archives, at least) of
any final reports or records from the ALS for 1933 and 1934, the
only way to compile a list of the fellows is to sort through these
partial reports from 1930 and 1933 and try to reconcile the varying
numbers and lists. Fortunately, the ALS forwarded detailed financial
accounting for its Rockefeller funds, and these ledgers show
expenditures from 1928 through the end of
1932.70 Almost in answer to a historian's prayers, the outgoing ledger shows payments to
individual scholars, although vexingly these accountant's
documents fail to give first names for the individuals listed as recipients!
Thanks to these ledger sheets and other documents, it is possible to
compile a list of all known recipients from 1928 to 1933 - and the
number totals sixty-three. Unless further documents surface in Germany,
I am prepared to conclude that the figure mentioned by Schairer
and Simons in November 1933 is the actual total of Germans
receiving financial assistance from the five-year experiment.
Of these sixty-three individuals, it is possible to identify
more than half (see Appendix 2). Young and ALS directors wrote
biographical sketches of the first twenty-two grant recipients. Later
reports, especially the documents from 1933 on the ALS's
successes, provide additional biographical details about a few more of
these talented personalities. The Rockefeller archives also hold a
curious list of Kandidaten, dating from 1930, that provides
tantalizing glimpses into the ALS's operation midway into its life (see Appendix 3, Part 1). This list of 133 names provides first names for
some, but not all, of those fellowship recipients who came to be listed
on the 1931 and 1932 financial ledgers. Finally, although not part of
the Rockefeller archives, some documents held by Geoffrey
Winthrop Young's son, including unpublished letters and essays presented to
the elder Young, either confirm identifications suggested by
biographical dictionaries and other standard reference works or
provide the names of many of the fellows who are listed only by
their last name in the financial ledgers at the Rockefeller archives.
Even with this documentation, seven of the sixty-three fellows
remain unidentified and to date I have been unable to find any
biographical details on seventeen and only cursory information on three
or four others. Thus, roughly one-third of the sixty-three stipend
recipients must remain shadowy figures for the moment, and the
absence of biographical information makes it impossible to paint
a definitive historical portrait of the ALS fellows as yet.
Another consideration is whether the sixty-three fellows
who received stipends should be viewed as a separate, and more
select class, than those whose names are included in the list of
candidates. Because the Lincoln Stiftung had so few funds, Young and the
German directors stressed the services that the ALS played by
simply offering advice or referrals to other sources of funds, such as
the Studienstiftung. Given the eminence of many of the names on
the list of candidates, it is possible that the Lincoln Stiftung viewed
these men and women as gifted individuals who were equal to its
stipendiaries but in less need. Seen in this light, it is arguable that the
list of candidates in 1930 represents Weimar Germany's
"best and brightest"the fruit of a two-year search for genius and leading
personalities in all fields of human endeavor. Certainly, Young and his
German collaborators never suggested that this narrow pool of applicants
was anything but distinguished; other ALS documents suggest that
these individuals were all likely candidates for financial aid had
sufficient funds been available. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation's
archival copy mistranslates the list as "Fellows of the Abraham
Lincoln Stiftung." Because this document, the only surviving list of
candidates, dates from 1930, it also raises the possibility that other
documents, listing later nominations, almost certainly must have
been compiled and perhaps may still exist in German archives. Any
final judgment about the Lincoln Stiftung's record would have to
consider the complete circle of possible choices before deciding
how well the administrators fared in recognizing the leaders of the
future. To give only one example, the list of candidates in 1930
contains Hannah Arendt, nominated by Lotte Israel. Candidates
were ranked, apparently, by the urgency or priority of their cases, and
Arendt was assigned eighty-fourth place out of these 133
individuals considered for aid. Given her subsequent international
recognition, and her stature as a philosopher, one wonders on what
basis her case was deferred (see Appendix 3, Part 2). Did ALS
directors not see her promise as a philosopher, or did they deem her too
narrowly intellectualan able German scholar but one without
the "force of character" or leadership that would render her work
influential beyond the university? Or, as seems likely, did they simply
deem her case a lower priority because other fellowship agencies were
willing and ready to assist her? And, in a minor key, when did Lotte
Israel join the ranks of ALS advisers? Did her nomination carry less
weight than those of the original nominators? The answers to such
questions cannot be found in the ALS documents; there is no file or
dossier on Arendt, or correspondence from Israel to Schairer or
Simons, although surely such letters must have existed at one
time.71
How much can be read into the small number of fellows
and candidatestwo distinct, if overlapping, sets of individuals?
And, what importance should be attached to the original list of
nominators (advisers), with its blue ribbon composition? At first glance,
it would appear that such a small sampling could hardly have
any statistical significance. Yet, the Lincoln Stiftung experiment
clearly intrigued the Rockefeller Foundation's program officers in the
social sciences because it provided a possible "control group"
against which the foundation's own fellowship selections in Germany
might be measured. In retrospect, however, the significance of the
Lincoln Stiftung experiment derives from its glimpse into the response
of talented younger Germans to the crisis of the 1930s. Because
the Lincoln Stiftung clearly succeeded in recruiting its advisers and
trustees from a wide cross-section of Weimar Germany's intellectual
elite, drawn from all points of the political and ideological spectrum, it
is not unfair to conclude that the list of candidates and fellows
represents the German elite's selection of the most promising
younger scholars, political leaders, and educators. The Lincoln
Stiftung claimed to represent more than, say, the social science
fellowship program of the Rockefeller Foundation; the latter claimed to
offer postgraduate fellowships only to the best younger economists,
sociologists, and political scientists. It sought highly specialized
experts who were the best in their fields; it judged success by academic
standards, and did not seek wider leadership or demand exceptional moral character. By contrast, Young's definition of the ALS's
role called for a search for "intellectual distinction . . . reinforced by
a humane temperament and a force of character which could
make such mental quality an effective
influence."72
Given this broad and difficult standard, it is no wonder
that Rockefeller Foundation officials threw up their hands in
despair. Appleget actually ventured to Berlin in 1930 and met with four
of the ALS fellows: Eduard Baumgarten, Richard Gothe, Hans
Queling, and Heinrich Rogge. Appleget wrote to Woods, who in
retirement continued to take an interest in the ALS, and offered this mixed
assessment:
We have heard a great deal for and against the Stiftung.
All of us are, I think, uncertain about it. Allied to that is a
certain amount of uncertainty regarding Geoffrey Young.
Personally, I like him and have had some interesting times
with him. I cannot fail to admire his courage and a great many
of his qualities. All of us, however, would be nonplussed if
you asked us for a percentage grade either on the Stiftung
or Young. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that
of the group of fellows mentioned, I personally met and
talked with four, Baumgarten, Rogge, Gothe, and Queling, and
was equally puzzled about them. Human nature is a hard
thing to work with.73
Appleget's discomfiture is perhaps understandable. Of the
small group of fellows he met, two - Baumgarten and Gothe - had
spent considerable time in the United States and undoubtedly spoke
English well. Baumgarten had taught for five years at various
American universities as an exchange professor and had already
finished a translation of John Dewey's works into German; Gothe at one
point in his career had lived in New York, where he had organized
and directed a German youth group. Both were liberal in outlook
and quite sympathetic to America.
By contrast, Rogge and Queling must have presented
much harder cases. Even by the eccentric standards of the Lincoln
Stiftung, Queling was in a class by himself. Chosen at the insistence of
an adviser who thought the experiment was leaning too heavily
toward academic figures, Queling was the epitome of the outsider who
did not fit into the German educational system: He had left
school and Germany in the mid-1920s to travel to India overland,
working his way there with several comrades by playing music as a
street performer. While in India he sought out Mahatma Gandhi
and Rabindranath Tagore, living briefly with the former. Queling
described his adventures in a series of travel books. Queling hardly
fit the Rockefeller Foundation's model of intellectual success or
distinction, and Appleget must have had difficulty in evaluating a
young travel writer with such an unusual curriculum
vitae.74
The fourth fellow, Rogge, was, in fact, one of the least
appealing of the Lincoln Stiftung fellows. He was well into middle age
when the ALS chose to assist him - he was forty-four years old in
1930, when the organization forwarded its biographical sketch to
the Rockefeller Foundation. He had studied law in prewar Berlin
and had entered the civil service with the intention of pursuing
further legal studies once he had gained practical experience. Rogge
became so ill during World War I that he lost his position, and, according
to the ALS's files, "continued his studies privately, but under the
greatest financial difficulties." During the hard postwar years Rogge
received support from the Notgemeinschaft and served as a
consultant to the German Foreign Office. By the time the Lincoln
Stiftung took note of him, Rogge had made his reputation with his
writings on the war debt and international law.
Rogge appealed to the Lincoln Stiftung directors not only
because of his late-developing talents and personal hardships but
also because he wrote in a pacifist idiom about international law.
"Peace by means of law is the political programme of the world peace
movement," Rogge noted in one statement cited by the ALS, "and, it
is the axiom of the international law policy which seeks to extend
international law and to give more importance to the League of
Nations as the guarantee of
peace."75 Rogge proposed to put
pacifism and international law on a more scientific, or scholarly, basis,
and the Lincoln Stiftung agreed to aid his research - in essence,
giving him a sabbatical from his occasional work for the foreign
affairs ministry. The prospectus for Rogge's planned book,
The Science of Peace, did not in fact differ greatly from the no less metaphysical
speculations of many English or American advocates of international law.
Given this research topic, it is not difficult to see why the
Lincoln Stiftung would choose to support Rogge's work. Yet what was
not apparent from Rogge's abstract discussion of the role of
international law were the nationalist sentiments that motivated his
work with the foreign ministry and the ill will that remained from
his own experiences. It appears that the legal scholar had also become
a very embittered man over the course of the years from 1914 to
1930. Already noticeable in Rogge's work on the international
settlement of 1919 and subsequent agreements on reparations was a
lingering resentment toward the Allied powers. For example, he referred
to the Versailles peace treaty like any other German nationalist as
a Diktat, and when the Nazis took power in 1933 his writings
became much more openly nationalistic and propagandistic. In the
years between the Nazi seizure of power and the onset of war in
1939 Rogge wrote not only a theoretical treatise on international law
but also several polemical defenses of German foreign policy with
such revealing titles as Hitler's Peace Policy and International
Law and Hitler's Search for Peace with
England.76 Rogge's brand of peace, then,
was rooted in a singular interpretation of international law that
pivoted on his continued belief that the postwar peace settlements had
been illegitimate. Not surprisingly, when Hitler disavowed the
provisions of the Versailles settlement, Rogge was only too happy to lend
his pen and his legal training to the Foreign Office to justify
Germany's violations. Judging by a posthumously published volume on
East Prussia - a territory lost to the Poles after 1945 - Rogge never
reconciled himself to the territorial settlements of either 1919 or
1945.77
Rogge's willing service to the Nazi regime brings us to the
crux of the matter: Any evaluation of an experimental foundation
designed to produce, as Schairer maintained, humane leadership
and positive social outcomes cannot be satisfied by simply noting
those grant recipients who later published academic treatises and
secured positions - that is, by the normal standards with which
the Rockefeller Foundation judged its research grants. Although
many of the ALS fellows went on to distinguished academic
careers - including Baumgarten, Eschenburg, Raupach, Vetter, among
others - even its organizers would have agreed that this aspect of its
work was not enough to distinguish it from conventional
fellowship-granting organizations.
The Lincoln Stiftung's inner circle - Young, Schairer,
and Simons - were proudest of their work with youth movement
leaders and adult education schools. The conference in Berlin in 1929 in
which Severing took part, pointed to the kinds of practical
outcomes that Young and his German colleagues thought would be the
greatest contribution of their organization. At the heart of this work
were Dehmel and Gothe, two of the most dynamic figures of their
generation. Dehmel, as we have seen, spent four years on the
western front and following the war had devoted himself to rebuilding
the youth movement. For his part, Gothe was no less active in
organizing labor camps and youth organizations. Following Buske's
death, Gothe seems to have assumed an increasingly larger role in the
work of the Silesian and eastern German youth movements. Like
Dehmel, Gothe saw military service, but he only entered the German army
in its last, disintegrating days. Gothe played an active role in the
soldiers' councils of 1918-19 and sided with the Independent
Socialists. The Rockefeller archives contain a brief account of this
period in his own words: "Because I had on several occasions stood
up against military oppression, my fellow soldiers chose me in 1918
as a member of the soldiers' council. Thus, at the age of 18 I was
given a responsibility far too heavy for my
shoulders."78 Following the German revolution and the disarming of the soviets, Gothe left
Germany for Brazil and, after three years, the United States, where
he organized a student association. Gothe, in fact, was a born
organizer: He pursued his studies at night while working day jobs.
When he finally returned to Germany his working class
background - and the fact that he had never attended either a
Gymnasium or Realschuleseemed destined to exclude him from the university degree
he sought. "The door to the university is very narrow," he wrote,
"But for the ALS I should not have been able to hold out until it
opened for me; without its help, I should not now have been already able
to study for a year, with good results and profound inner
satisfaction."79 Young appended a note on Gothe's biography when the ALS
filed its first report with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1930: "When I
first suggested the creation of the A.L.S., the words were used to me
by one of the Foundation Trustees 'If one man is found of the
real 'leader' type, in five years, who would not otherwise have
been found or furthered, the organization will have justified itself.'
Since I have gotten to know him, Gothe has often recurred to mind as
this single justification, if others had been
lacking."80 In addition to Gothe and Dehmel, several other ALS fellows were active in the
Boberhaus movement. Hans Raupach, Vetter, and others drew upon their own
earlier involvement with the youth movement in an attempt to
expand educational opportunities. It is important to note that
official interest in these activities began during the period when the
Weimar coalition - a group of centrist and leftist political
parties - governed Germany and sought to deal, albeit unsuccessfully, with the
depression and mounting unemployment.
For Dehmel, Gothe, and the other youth camp leaders the
coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 proved to be the great test. As
the leader of the Deutsche Freischar, Dehmel felt increased pressure
to merge his organization with Nazi Party youth
organizations. Raupach and others took positions with provincial governments
and party organizations that, it appears, quickly realized the
political value of the labor camps and the adult education programs
launched by various ALS fellows. After weeks of pressure Dehmel
announced his decision to join the National Socialists. In a letter published
by the party organ Der Angriff, Dehmel offered a public explanation
for his decision. Citing his previous work with German youth
movement groups, Dehmel argued, curiously, that his group had
always marched alongside more nationalist groups in the eastern
border zones and had attempted to show solidarity with pan-German
communities in the alienated territories and foreign cities of eastern
Europe. Whatever their differences in political activity or
organization, the aims of the centrist groups he led had been the same as those
of the nationalists, Dehmel averred.81
It was not long, however, before Dehmel was clashing with
Nazi Gauleiter and other party officials. Dehmel's defenders credited
him with public opposition to Nazi policies affecting the Silesian
youth groups, but although letters published decades later do suggest
that Dehmel disagreed with the tenor and policies of the Nazi
youth movement, it would be wrong to place Dehmel and many of
the Silesian youth leaders in the small camp of the opposition to
Hitler. Dehmel's attempt to compromise with the new regime does not
seem to have prevented his steady eclipse as the Nazi youth
movement absorbed the last vestiges of the independent youth groups.
When war came, Dehmel, along with a number of other fellows
(Raupach, for example), took refuge from these political struggles and
joined the German army.
For his part, Gothe, who had been Young's favorite example of
a Lincoln Stiftung discovery, found he no longer could work freely
with German youth and educational institutions. Although he,
like Dehmel, at first tried to continue his labor camp work with the
new Reich Labor Ministry, Gothe objected to the introduction of
compulsory service and the increasingly tighter Nazi control. When
Gothe, who seems to have thrown himself into opposition to the Nazis
with characteristic energy, came to understand that the Nazis were
quickly eliminating all independent centers of power, he chose to leave
Germany with his family. In 1938 he joined the emigration to the
New World. Once in New York, Appleget remembered their earlier
encounter in Berlin and warmly welcomed him - in fact, the
Rockefeller files suggest that the foundation vice president even helped
make temporary living arrangements for Gothe and his family.
In addition to Gothe, several ALS fellows showed outright
hostility toward the new regime. Rotten, who had cared for
English prisoners of war during World War I, fled to England; Karl
Dunker, a distinguished psychologist, became a refugee professor (but
committed suicide in 1940); the lyricist and poet Paula Ludwig, one
of the later appointments, also fled Germany, as did the writers
Hans Henny Jahnn, Albert Daudistel, and Stefan Andres. Maria
Sevenich, one of the handful of women grantees, spent time in a German
concentration camp for her work with a Catholic organization.
On the whole, however, the majority of the Lincoln
Stiftung's fellows seem neither to have resisted, emigrated, or actively
collaborated with the National Socialists. Like most Germans, they
continued to hold jobs and to work inconspicuously; Klatt, for
example, moved to Vienna and worked on studies of the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke. (Klatt's war record - he had been severely wounded in
World War I - may have spared him further harassment.) Those with
academic positions - Vetter, Goern, Baumgarten, and
others - continued to teach. Many of the fellows who had created educational
institutions found, like Gothe, that their independence would not
be tolerated.
The experience of the ALS fellows offers an interesting
window into the generation that came of age during World War I and
that grew to maturity during the interwar years. Many historians
have sought to meld the shared generational history of wartime
trauma and postwar misery into an explanation for the phenomenon of
fascism between the wars. As Robert Wohl wrote, "Fascism was
the great temptation of the generation of
1914."82 Moreover, in addition
to fueling political extremism, the experiences of the war
widened the usual generation gap, especially in Germany, where the
prewar youth movement had already launched a mild revolution
against the established order.
At first glance the experience of the Lincoln Stiftung would
seem to confirm this generational difference. As noted, the advisory
board or the talent scouts for the Lincoln Stiftung included over a
hundred of the nation's most prominent cultural and intellectual figures.
Although the roster of consultants or nominators was not the
randomly selected group associated with social scientific polls, it was
nonetheless a highly diverse and not unrepresentative sampling of
German intellectual leaders, albeit one tilted toward the
internationalist and pacifist side of the political spectrum. Among this group,
an astonishingly high number chose to emigrate. By contrast, for
those fellows whose careers I have been able to trace beyond 1933, no
more than a dozen chose to leave Germany. How can this disparity
be explained? For the moment, answers to these questions must
remain tentative and provisional, although it may be that
Simons's argument, that the younger and unknown fellows of the ALS
would find it easier to retain academic and other positions and remain
in Germany, is the simple answer to a complex question.
But if, as Kittredge's notes suggest, a high number of the
ALS's fellows obtained positions because they chose to join the Nazi
Party, then the gap between the advisers, scholars, and cultural figures
of an older generation and the fellows, who by and large were
members of the "generation of 1914," would be all the more striking.
In either case, further research into the careers of those selected by
the ALS promises to throw a powerful light onto the motives and
experiences of this distinguished group of younger intellectuals.
Despite the seemingly unremarkable record of most of its
fellows, the Lincoln Stiftung nonetheless played a supporting role
in the German resistance to Hitler. The advisory board, in
particular, contained a number of political activists, and there is evidence
that a few of these individuals continued to meet with Young after
the termination of the Rockefeller grant and the formal end of the
fellowship program. The ALS's network of over a hundred
advisers covered the entire length and breadth of Germany, and this
diverse group included men and women of all political persuasions.
Given this range of opinion, it is striking that over forty of the initial one
hundred advisers either played a role in the opposition to Hitler
or left Germany as émigrés. No less important, Young maintained
close ties with Simons and Schairer, who were both dismissed from
their positions by the Nazis, and with members of the ALS's
"presidential" or steering committee, a group that included Robert Bosch.
Among all the ALS's German advisers, or nominators,
Young developed the closest relationship with Kurt Hahn, the founder of
a private school in Baden-Württemberg. Hahn immediately came
into conflict with the new regime when he denounced the violent
murder of a young German Communist by six Nazi storm troopers.
Hahn sent a message to all of his Salem school graduates demanding
that they either "break with Hitler or break with Salem," and
shortly afterward his school was closed and Hahn was
arrested.83
Fearful for his friend's life, Young returned to Germany with
the archbishop of Canterbury to demand Hahn's release. Young, in
fact, was to make many such pilgrimages to Berlin, and he later
recalled one of these visits: "I had returned again now to Berlin, with
Sir William Deedes, in the first days of Adolf Hitler's
Chancellorship. There was still hope that an appeal to reason or compassion
might be listened to; and we were the bearers of a letter of
remonstrance about the internment camps and the Jewish persecution,
organized by Archbishop Temple and signed by well-known names from
every department of English
life."84 Young and his associates,
appealing to Franz von Papen, succeeded in securing Hahn's release,
and soon Hahn emigrated to England where he and Young established
a new boarding school, Gordonstoun, modeled after
Salem.85 The success of Hahn's educational venture spawned an international
movement, and in England the new school became the training
ground for Young's own son and many others who, after the war,
would form a network of distinguished schools based on Hahn's method.
Among Hahn's circle, and a member of the Lincoln
Stiftung's steering committee, was Bosch, who introduced Young and
Hahn to Karl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig and the focal point of one
of the major resistance groups. Although the ALS played only a
minor part in Bosch's life, and none at all in Goerdeler's, it did throw
Hahn into close association with Young, whose staunch advocacy
perhaps saved Hahn's life, and whose continued interest in Germany
proved of invaluable assistance to the circle around Goerdeler. Young,
in fact, helped to organize many appeals on behalf of political prisoners in Germany, and he took justifiable pride in his efforts to
save not only Hahn but the playwright Walter Hasenclever and
others. The British organizations formed in the 1930s by Young and
others to protest the Nazis' infringement of civil rights and academic
freedom may rightly be seen as precursors to Amnesty
International and other postwar human rights organizations.
Conclusion
Years later, in an unpublished chapter intended for his
autobiography, Young reflected on the aims of the Abraham Lincoln
Stiftung and the experiences of its fellows. In a passage that might serve
not only as his own verdict on the ALS but also as the epitaph for all
the educational efforts launched by liberal German educators,
Young wrote, "We were beginning to yoke high individual intelligence
with common sense, and with worldly intelligence, and we were in
hopes of being able to check the rising tide of despair and of revolution
in the country. But time proved too short for us, and the scope of
our work was too restricted."86
The Lincoln Stiftung did not work entirely in vain, however.
Of its hundred or more distinguished advisers, nearly thirty
escaped Nazi Germany as exiles, and a dozen or more who remained in
Germany actively opposed the new regime, with several taking part
in the resistance to Hitler. Among these resisters, advisers
Adolf Reichwein and Theodor Haubach, paid for their actions with
their lives.
Among those who left Germany or who labored quietly in
"inner exile," several lived to play an active role in the restoration
of the German universities and German intellectual life in the
postwar period: Theodor Eschenburg, August Rathmann, and others
like them were the final legacy of the ALS. They lived to rebuild
the German educational system on a sounder footing after 1945, and
in so doing may be said to be the final return on the Rockefeller
"investment," a legacy that no one among the American
foundation's officials ever expected and one that until today few have suspected.