Two issues in particular most exercised him and were also of concern to Horkheimer, with whom he frequently telephoned as my project developed. Both were of some importance. The first concerned the role that the Jewish background of most of the Institute’s members might have played in their development. This is, of course, an enormously complex and sensitive matter that has received frequent treatment in the Frankfurt School literature.26 Much depends on which figures are stressed, which periods in their lives, the definition of what it means to be Jewish—religious, ethnic, cultural—as well as the intangible issue of influence itself. In light of crude anti-Semitic denigrations of Critical Theory as an expression of something sinister to be deplored in the legacy of Judaism—a denigration that, alas, continues to this day27—it is fully understandable that both Horkheimer and Weil wanted to avoid being reduced to whatever version of Jewishness might be held responsible for their ideas. Like Freud, who was famously anxious to avoid the same reproach, they were very wary of such a simplistic reduction. Even though Löwenthal and Fromm had gone through periods of serious religious commitment during their association with the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, and Benjamin, abetted by his friendship with Gershom Scholem, had drawn on theological motifs in his work, the Institute in the 1920s had maintained a strongly materialist—that is, essentially Marxist—orientation.
There was, however, a subtle difference in the acknowledgment of the residual importance of their Jewish origins between Horkheimer and Weil. Although conceding that the Institute had always been especially sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism, Weil was adamant that he and his colleagues had long since left any trace of a meaningful Jewish heritage, understood in religious or other terms. To suggest that something else still mattered, he argued, was to fall into the trap of accepting racist definitions of Jewish identity. Horkheimer, for his part, had come to acknowledge in contrast at least a certain link between Critical Theory’s refusal to picture utopia and the Jewish prohibition on picturing God, the famous Bilderverbot. When he had returned to Germany after the war, he increasingly identified as a Jew, so much so that a headline of an interview with him in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland in 1952 was titled “The Jewish Rector and his German University.”28
When I pointed this out to Weil, he replied impatiently:
You refer to Horkheimer’s stressing his Jewishness as Rektor of the university. You seem not to know that then he even, on the high holidays, attended synagogue services (but not of the orthodox kind, just the reform-liberal one). But, as he told me, he did this not as a late Believer, but as an ostentatious act of a political nature … anyway you cannot project back into the 20s what the old Horkheimer of the 60s said or is now saying (including the “other” and the Bilderverbot, where I can’t follow him at all).29
The issue was also raised in Horkheimer’s letter to me of July 10, 1971, in which he wondered what I had meant by the “ethnic origins” of the members of the School. Whatever response I made—my own letters were not preserved—seemed to placate him, as on July 23, he responded:
Many thanks for your letter of July 15 and especially for what you said about the positive relations between the Critical Theory and the Bilderverbot. I myself frequently pointed to this connection. What a pity that we cannot talk personally about the significance of the materialistic as well as the theological elements in the development of the Frankfurter Schule.30
I ultimately veered closer to Horkheimer than Weil in my account, but I also remained convinced that, however much fuel it might give to anti-Semitic critics of Critical Theory, it was impossible to ignore the volatile and rapidly evolving situation of German Jews in the Weimar era in making sense of the Frankfurt School’s origins and perhaps its intellectual investments as well. I felt some vindication when I read in Leo Löwenthal’s autobiographical interviews with Helmut Dubiel the following admission: “However much I once tried to convince Martin Jay that there were no Jewish motifs among us at the Institute, now, years later and after mature consideration, I must admit to a certain influence of Jewish traditions, which were codeterminative.”31
On the other sensitive issue that arose, Weil and Horkheimer were firmly united. The dissertation had lacked a snappy title, so when I looked for one for the book, I returned to the essay I had written for Midstream in 1969 after Adorno’s death, which had been called “The Permanent Exile of Theodor Adorno.” Although Marcuse and Löwenthal were in favor, both Weil and Horkheimer had grave misgivings about calling the book Permanent Exiles. When I floated it as a possibility, Horkheimer responded in January 1972, that it “seems to me problematic, as it doesn’t apply to a number of our members, Theodor W. Adorno, Fred Pollock and myself. Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse made America their home.”32 When I wrote back explaining that I had meant it metaphorically to suggest the even before their actual emigration, Institute members had been anxious to avoid co-optation and after the war, Critical Theory had maintained its distance from any real “homecoming,” Horkheimer was not placated. On March 5, he sent an urgent telegram that read “title still seems misleading to me,” backed up by a letter sent the same day, which is worth extensively quoting:
The idea that during “the period from 1923 to 1950” the Institute’s members had been obsessed by “the fear of co-optation and integration” is certainly not precise. As long as [Carl] Grūnberg was the director this surely was not the case, and after I had been appointed up to our emigration several of us definitely were non-conformists in some ways but no “Exiles.” During our stay in America most of us were exiles with regard to fascist Germany, but certainly not with regard to democratic states like the USA and postwar Germany. Otherwise our relations to conservative people like President Butler would have never been what they were, nor would Franz Neumann have spent so much time in West-Berlin to help organizing [sic] the university, nor had I returned to Frankfurt to do about the same there and in addition to rebuild the Institute with American and German public funds.33
Weil was no less distressed by the initial idea for a title, which he and Horkheimer had discussed by phone, and let me know more explicitly why it was not only imprecise, but also, in his eyes, dangerous:
Here is why I consider this title fundamentally wrong and damaging: especially because of the reinforcement of misunderstanding you give by your insistence on saying, or broadly hinting at, the influence the so-called joint ethnic origins of our group is supposed to have had on our way of thinking, the “Exiles” title will lend retroactively to justify all the attacks our enemies launched against the Institute and the Frankfurt School, to wit, that we as rootless outsiders had no business or justification to instill “undeutsche Gedanken” [un-German thoughts] = subversive feelings into German students.34
Clearly, I had unintentionally entered a minefield by assuming that the status of “permanent exile” would be more a badge of honor than a source of reproach, but I could now better understand the source of their anxiety. There were—and continue to be—criticisms from the nationalist right of the allegedly baleful influence of returning émigrés on postwar German culture.35 Whereas I thought, perhaps naively, that slanders against “rootless cosmopolitans” were things of the past, Horkheimer and Weil still felt their sting and were determined not to let my book give ammunition to their purveyors. Ironically, such charges anticipated a comparable critique of the emigres’ influence on American culture later leveled by xenophobic cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom.36
Hoping to dissuade me, Horkheimer and Weil offered a few alternatives, ranging from the pedestrian “The Early Stages of Critical Theory” to the melodramatic “Rebels with a Cause.” Finally, I hit on the title that the book ultimately bore, which I derived consciously from two earlier works—C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—and unconsciously from a passage in Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, which I had read a number of years earlier.37 Later, someone casually mentioned to me that source, and I had a chance to publicly credit Brown in the preface to a later book, a collection of my essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America, which I titled Permanent Exiles.38 In any event, both Horkheimer and