Although independence, both financial and intellectual, was the goal of the founders, they thought it prudent to seek some affiliation with the University of Frankfurt, itself only recently established in 1914. The original idea of calling it the Institut für Marxismus (Institute for Marxism) was abandoned as too provocative, and a more Aesopian alternative was sought (not for the last time in the Frankfurt School’s history). The suggestion of the Education Ministry to call it the Felix Weil Institute of Social Research was declined by Weil, who “wanted the Institut to become known, and perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism as a scientific discipline, not due to the founder’s money.”12 It was decided to call it simply the Institut für Sozialforschung. Weil also refused to “habilitate” himself and become a Privatdozent, or to consider the possibility of further academic advancement leading to the directorship of the Institut, because “countless people would have been convinced that I ‘bought’ myself the ‘venia legendi’ or, later, the chair.”13 Holding a chair as a governmentally salaried full professor at the university was, in fact, a stipulation for the directorship of the Institut as spelled out in the agreement reached with the Ministry of Education. Weil proposed as candidate an economist from the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, Kurt Albert Gerlach. Weil himself retained control of the Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung (Society of Social Research), the Institut’s financial and administrative body.
Gerlach shared with the Institut’s founders an aesthetic and political distaste for bourgeois society. He had cultivated the former through connections with the Stefan George circle and the latter through an acquaintanceship with the Fabians gained during several years of study in England. His political inclinations were firmly to the left. Many years later, Pollock would remember him as a nonparty socialist,14 while the British historians F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry in their study of Richard Sorge wrote: “It is probable that, like Sorge, he was at this time a member of the Communist Party.”15 Whatever the precise nature of Gerlach’s politics, when proposed by Weil, he was accepted by the economics and social science department as professor and by the Education Ministry as first head of the Institut. In early 1922, Gerlach wrote a “Memorandum on the Foundation of an Institute of Social Research”16 in which he stressed the synoptic goals of the Institut. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that he would deliver a series of inaugural lectures on anarchism, socialism, and Marxism. But the lectures were never given, for in October, 1922, Gerlach suddenly died of an attack of diabetes, at the age of thirty-six. (He left his library of eight thousand volumes to Weil, who passed it on to the Institut.)
The search for a successor focused on an older man who would serve as interim director until one of the younger founding members was old enough to acquire a chair at the university. The first possibility was Gustav Mayer, the noted historian of socialism and the biographer of Engels. But the negotiations foundered, as Mayer remembers it, on the demands made by Weil—whom he later dismissed as an Edelkommunist (an aristocratic communist)—for total control over the Institut’s intellectual life.17 If this was true, Weil’s insistence was certainly short-lived, for the next candidate, who actually got the position, asserted his own domination very quickly. Weil’s influence on intellectual questions appears, in fact, never to have been very great.
The final choice for Gerlach’s replacement was Carl Grünberg, who was persuaded to leave his post as professor of law and political science at the University of Vienna to come to Frankfurt.18 Grünberg had been born in Focsani, Rumania, in 1861 of Jewish parents (he later converted to Catholicism to assume his chair in Vienna). He studied jurisprudence from 1881 to 1885 Austrian capital, where he subsequently combined a legal and an academic career. In 1909 he became professor at Vienna and in the subsequent year began editing the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers’ Movement), popularly known as Grünbergs Archiv.
Politically, Grünberg was an avowed Marxist, who has been called “the father of Austro-Marxism” by one observer.19 This characterization, however, has been disputed by the historian of that movement, who has written that it was true only “insofar as the representatives of Austro-Marxism were his students at the University of Vienna, but not in the sense that Grünberg himself can be counted among the Austro-Marxists, since his work had a primarily historical character and was not devoted to achieving a unity of theory and practice.”20 Grünberg’s relative indifference to theoretical questions seems to have persisted after his coming to Frankfurt. Although his journal did contain an occasional theoretical article, such as Karl Korsch’s important “Marxism and Philosophy” in 1923 and Georg Lukács’s critique of Moses Hess three years later,21 it was primarily devoted to historical and empirical studies usually grounded in a rather undialectical, mechanistic Marxism in the Engels-Kautsky tradition. Weil’s own theoretical interests were never very different, and Grünberg was certainly in agreement with the goal of an interdisciplinary institute dedicated to a radical dissection of bourgeois society. So the problem of Gerlach’s successor was satisfactorily resolved by the time the Institut was ready to begin operations. Grünberg, it might be noted in passing, was the first avowed Marxist to hold a chair at a German university.
The official creation of the Institut occurred on February 3, 1923, by a decree of the Education Ministry, following an agreement between it and the Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung. Accepting an invitation by Professor Drevermann of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural Science to use its halls as a temporary home, the Institut immediately began to function, as Weil remembers it, “among open moving boxes filled with books, on improvised desks made of boards, and under the skeletons of a giant whale, a diplodocus, and an ichthyosaurus.”22
In March, 1923, construction of a building to house its operations at Victoria-Allee 17, near the corner of Bockenheimer Landstrasse on the university campus, was begun. Franz Röckle, Weil’s choice as architect, designed a spare, cube-shaped, five-story structure in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style then becoming fashionable in avant-garde Weimar circles. In later years the irony of the Institute being housed in a building whose architecture reflected the spirit of sober “objectivity” that Critical Theory so often mocked23 was not lost on its members. Nevertheless, its thirty-six-seat reading room, sixteen small workrooms, four seminar rooms with a hundred places, and library with space for seventy-five thousand volumes served the young Institut well.
On June 22, 1924, the Institut’s freshly completed building was officially opened. Grünberg gave the dedicating address.24 At the outset of his remarks, he stressed the need for a research-oriented academy in opposition to the then current trend in German higher education towards teaching at the expense of scholarship. Although the Institut was to offer some instruction, it would try to avoid becoming a training school for “mandarins”25 prepared only to function in the service of the status quo. In pointing to the tendency of German universities to become centers of specialized instruction—institutes for “mandarins”—Grünberg was putting his finger on a persistent problem in German history. More than a century before, Wilhelm von Humboldt had attempted to draw a line between “universities” devoted to practical training and “academies” fostering pure research.26 Over the years, however, the critical “academy” had been clearly shunted aside by the adjustment-oriented university as the model for German higher education. The Institut from its inception was dedicated to countering